“Bitcoin miners are turning into unexpected power brokers in the fight for AI capacity,” — this is the conclusion reached by analysts at investment bank Bernstein in their recent report. Against the backdrop of Google and Blackstone’s plans to create a cloud giant, it turned out that the main shortage in this race is not money or chips, but access to electricity, which mining companies already possess.

As Bernstein stated — “This can be tracked by the massive volume of power: miners control more than 27 gigawatts of planned capacity in the US.” Since obtaining permits for such connections takes more than four years, miners have become holders of a kind of “golden ticket” for tech giants from Silicon Valley.

But experts further clarified that this does not mean an abandonment of cryptocurrency mining, but rather a strategic repositioning. The industry has already announced AI-related contracts worth more than $90 billion, making players like IREN, Riot Platforms, and Core Scientific crucial infrastructure providers for the next generation of computing.