In the face of a profitability crisis, industrial-scale bitcoin miners are transforming their data centers into AI factories.

One afternoon in June 2024, I stood up against the fence of a sprawling industrial facility a few miles outside of Corsicana, Texas. Over a metal gate, I watched a bright yellow excavator claw at the dirt and flatbed trucks shuttle to and fro. A hangar-like structure with a gleaming white roof stretched hundreds of meters along the opposite perimeter. The company that owned the plot, Riot Platforms, was busily constructing the world’s largest bitcoin mine.

A year and a half later, a projected two-thirds of the facility is being repurposed to accommodate AI and high-performance computing (HPC) tasks. Less a temple to bitcoin, the facility is poised to become an AI megafactory.

Across the US, an identical pattern is playing out at bitcoin mining facilities owned by a variety of operators. In the last 18 months, at least eight other publicly traded bitcoin mining companies—Bitfarms, Core Scientific, Riot, IREN, TeraWulf, CleanSpark, Bit Digital, MARA Holdings, and Cipher Mining—have announced plans to pivot either partly or wholly to AI.

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