Texas miners are making a tough choice of keeping the business of crypto mining intact or moving ahead with AI. According to a report by CNBC, The town of Abilene is currently venturing into the rapidly growing field of artificial intelligence. To “meet the unique needs of AI companies,” such as enabling advanced cloud computing for applications like medical research and aircraft design, the 200-megawatt data center to be built just outside of Abilene will be built, according to a multibillion-dollar deal announced by Denver-based Crusoe Energy Systems and Houston-based tech company Lancium. This is the initial stage of a 1.2 gigawatt expansion.
This agreement is made at a time when Bitcoin miners are racing to ink agreements with AI developers in an attempt to boost their declining profits by bringing in new clients for their huge data centers.
Why Are Bitcoin Miners In Trouble?
Bitcoin mining, by the end of 2020, was making more and more money, but in March 2021, it appeared that profit growth had ceased. In the process of mining cryptocurrency, a computer attempts to resolve challenging logic problems to validate transactions within the blockchain. The miner receives cryptocurrency as a block reward once this operation is finished. The fundamental idea behind this trend is that computers with higher hashrates, or processing power, should be able to solve more riddles and mine more coins. A miner’s ability to profit from this is dependent on several factors, including transaction fees, the amount of electricity consumed throughout the process, and the efficiency of the hardware being used.
Research by Statista highlights that this hashrate and block reward for Bitcoin miners has been falling since March 2021. That coupled with hostility from the government over power consumption makes it even more difficult for Bitcoin miners to sustain the rising demand.
Why Are Crypto Miners Choosing AI?
Crypto miners usually have access to energy and processing infrastructure, two things that AI businesses need in significant quantities. A report by the Financial Times says that AI companies are wagering that accessing high-performance computing (HPC) data centers owned by miners would be less expensive and faster than constructing their own. Prominent digital corporations such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have declared their intention to invest tens of billions of dollars in building data center infrastructure to facilitate their artificial intelligence goals. Investor interest in recent cloud start-ups like CoreWeave and Lambda Labs, which concentrate on renting access to GPUs, has increased due to the demand for AI capabilities.
