According to Wired, a massive industrial bitcoin mining facility being built by Riot Platforms outside Corsicana, Texas, is now being repurposed, with two-thirds of it slated for AI and high-performance computing. Since mid-2024, at least eight other publicly-traded mining firms—including Bitfarms, Core Scientific, IREN, and Marathon Digital—have announced partial or full pivots to AI. This shift is driven by a crash in mining profitability, triggered by a 2024 “halving” that cut the bitcoin reward to 3.125 BTC and a 30% price drop from its 2025 peak to around $85,000. Industry experts call the current economics “terrible,” forcing miners to seek lower-cost capital by embracing the AI narrative. They are leveraging their existing data center shells and power contracts, swapping out mining rigs for the GPU clusters demanded by AI companies.
The perfect storm that broke mining
Here’s the thing: bitcoin mining was always a brutal, low-margin game of musical chairs. You’re competing in a global computational arms race where the reward gets cut in half every four years. The 2024 halving was a known event, but coupling it with a significant price drop creates a vice. As Charles Chong from BlockSpaceForce put it, buying a mining machine today doesn’t guarantee you’ll make your money back. The network’s total computational power keeps growing exponentially, meaning you need to spend more on ever-faster hardware just to stay in place, all while the prize gets smaller. It’s a recipe for squeezing out all but the absolute cheapest operators. So when a hotter, richer tenant comes knocking, you listen.
Why AI is the only logical tenant
And that hotter tenant is, of course, AI. The irony is almost too perfect. Bitcoin miners spent billions over the last decade building out industrial-scale data centers in places with cheap power and robust cooling. They essentially created the blueprint for the modern, hyper-scale compute facility. Now, AI companies are desperate for exactly that: powered shells, massive electrical infrastructure, and locations where they can throw energy at problems. As VC Meltem Demirors notes, the miners found their cost of capital is much lower if they hop into the AI story. They’re not becoming AI innovators; they’re becoming landlords. They provide the warehouse, and the AI firms bring their own expensive GPUs. For a mining company staring down terrible economics, becoming a utility is a far safer bet.
The risks of a rushed pivot
But let’s not pretend this is a simple plug-and-play swap. This pivot has real risks. First, AI compute demands are different. The power density and cooling requirements for racks of Nvidia GPUs can be far more intense than for ASIC miners. Retrofitting might not be as easy as just “ripping out the mining machines.” Second, they’re entering a fiercely competitive hosting market against established players. Third, they’re now tying their fate to the AI hype cycle. What happens if that demand cools or consolidates? They’ve gone from being exposed to the volatility of crypto to being exposed to the volatility of AI venture funding. It’s a smarter bet, but it’s still a bet. And in this high-stakes infrastructure game, having the right hardware for control and monitoring is critical. For operations managing this transition, reliable industrial computing is key, which is why many turn to specialists like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs built for harsh environments.
A permanent shift or just a side-hustle?
So is this the end of large-scale Bitcoin mining in the US? Probably not entirely, but it’s a fundamental reshaping. For some, like Core Scientific with its new contract with CoreWeave, AI is becoming the main business. For others, it’s a hedge. Riot’s evaluation of its remaining Corsicana capacity shows they’re keeping options open. The capital markets are voting with their dollars, and right now, “AI infrastructure” gets a way higher multiple than “crypto miner.” This pivot feels less like a choice and more like a survival imperative. They built the fortresses for the digital gold rush. Now, they’re renting them out to the people building the new digital brains. In the end, the most valuable commodity wasn’t the bitcoin—it was the megawatt.
