Anthropic just secured the largest computing deal the AI industry has ever seen. The company secured 3.5 gigawatts of next-generation Google TPU computing through Broadcom. In the same week, Anthropic highlighted its incredible growth, with annual revenue now exceeding the $30 billion mark, more than triple the $9 billion reported at the end of 2025, and the number of customers who spent $1 million or more on Claude doubling from 500 to 1,000 in less than two months. CoinDesk framed this as Bitcoin miners gaining a powerful new rival in the fight for cheap electricity. However, this framing misses what is actually going on inside.
We have signed agreements with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity to provide training and services for frontier cloud models. It will start operating in 2027.
— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) April 6, 2026
Bitcoin miners are not preparing for battle, but rather changing direction, and the numbers speak for themselves. Core Scientific, one of the largest publicly traded miners, plans to liquidate virtually all of its Bitcoin holdings in 2026 to fund a 1.2 gigawatt conversion to AI hosting, The Block reported. Hut 8 has a $7 billion data center contract with Anthropic itself, with Google backstopping it. TeraWulf’s contracted HPC revenue is $12.8 billion. The reason this is happening is in mathematics. Miners lose approximately $19,000 per incident $BTC Compared to AI hosting services that offer long-term, stable cash flows backed by corporate contracts, they have had to step out.
What Anthropic Signed and Why 3.5 GW Matters
Anthropic’s biggest infrastructure deal came on April 6, when it announced it secured access to 3.5 gigawatts of next-generation Google TPU computing capacity through Broadcom starting in 2027. Bloomberg and CNBC confirmed the terms of the partnership. This new capacity is on top of the 1 gigawatt of Google Compute that Anthropic has already accepted in 2026, according to Broadcom’s SEC filing, which also confirms that the majority of the new capacity will be based in the United States. Broadcom has separately signed a long-term agreement with Google to design and supply future generations of custom TPU chips through 2031. This means this is a structural multi-year build. Alongside the deal, Anthropic also revealed annual run-rate revenue of more than $30 billion, up from about $9 billion reported late last year. In less than two months, Claude’s corporate customers, who spend more than $1 million annually, doubled from 500 to more than 1,000.
These numbers are staggering. A single 1 gigawatt data center consumes approximately the same amount of electricity as 1 million American homes. Anthropic’s 3.5 gigawatt contract is roughly equivalent to powering the equivalent of 3.5 million homes to a single AI company dedicated entirely to AI training and inference. As CoinDesk noted, a deal of this size highlights how AI has become one of the biggest sources of new electricity demand in the US. Power grids that were not designed to absorb this type of concentrated load are now being asked to do just that. For Bitcoin miners, who have built their entire business model on the availability of cheap, frequently stranded electricity, this signal is impossible to ignore. The most capitalized players in the tech industry are competing for the same electrons, and they’re paying a lot of money to get them.
Bitcoin miners are becoming AI landlords
The changes taking place are already changing the revenue structure of the entire industry. According to CoinShares, listed miners could earn up to 70% of their total revenue from AI hosting by the end of this year, an increase of about 30% as of today, and companies that already have AI contracts will see their mining revenue plummet from about 85% to less than 20%. At the same time, more than $70 billion in cumulative AI and high-performance computing deals were announced across the public mining sector, turning miners into data center operators and still mining Bitcoin.
When you look at the size of these deals, the axis becomes very clear. Hut 8, for example, unveiled a 15-year, $7 billion data center lease deal in Louisiana with Anthropic as the anchor tenant and Google as the financial backstop, with the site capable of expanding to multiple gigawatts of capacity. Another publicly traded miner, TeraWulf, secured $12.8 billion in HPC contract revenue from long-term AI hosting agreements. Meanwhile, Core Scientific, one of the largest publicly traded miners, is preparing to monetize virtually all of its Bitcoin holdings to fund the transformation of 1.2 gigawatts of AI infrastructure.
The reasons for this change in direction become clearer when we dig into the economics. With production costs approaching $80,000, public miners are currently losing about $19,000 per Bitcoin produced. $BTC It trades for nearly $68,000. Although AI infrastructure is far more capital intensive at $8 million to $15 million per megawatt compared to mining’s $700,000 to $1 million, it offers something miners have never had before: stable contract revenue over a 10-year period from blue-chip companies like Anthropic and Google. This essentially transforms them from speculative operators to infrastructure owners. What we are witnessing is not a side pivot, but the biggest business model change in Bitcoin mining history. An industry built on volatile block rewards is being restructured into an industry that sells power, space, and uptime to the AI economy.
The power grid becomes the new battleground
Power grids are exposed to levels of stress that they were not designed to absorb. PJM Interconnection, the nation’s largest electricity transmission operator, projects a 6 gigawatt deficit by 2027. This is equivalent to six large nuclear power plants shutting down at the same time. According to industry analysis cited by S&P Global, data center power demand in the United States is expected to jump from less than 15 GW today to 75.8 GW in 2026, 108 GW in 2028, and 134.4 GW in 2030, an approximately nine-fold increase over seven years. Five AI data centers are scheduled to reach 1 GW of power capacity each in 2026 alone, making one facility equivalent to the power consumption of a small American city. Up to 11 GW of data center capacity announced for 2026 has yet to break ground, and 50% of global projects are already facing delays due to power constraints and lack of grid equipment. Anthropic’s 3.5 GW initiative fits directly into this environment.
It turns out that what Bitcoin miners have built over the past decade is exactly what AI needs. Favorable power purchase agreements in remote locations, extensive grid connections, proximity to substations, cooling capacity, and land were operational advantages that miners were fiercely competing to secure. These are currently the most sought-after infrastructure inputs for building AI. Hut 8’s Louisiana site makes this point clearly. The same facility designed for hash rate is being leased to Anthropic for AI inference. Miners have not lost the energy war. They have always owned the battlefield and are now collecting rent. As CoinDesk pointed out, large Bitcoin miners are increasingly positioning themselves as power and data center infrastructure providers from which to mine Bitcoin, rather than the other way around. The hard work leading up to the AI boom has been happening all along within the Bitcoin mining sector.
What this means for Bitcoin and what to watch out for
This pivot has real implications for Bitcoin itself. Core Scientific and other miners are liquidating their holdings to fund AI, putting direct selling pressure on an already stressed spot market. $BTC The stock is currently trading at about $68,000, down about 47% from its all-time high of $126,000 set in October. Beyond price, there are other aspects of network security that are worth noting. Hash rate, or the total computing power spent mining and processing Bitcoin transactions, is the primary measure of network strength. According to techi.com, mining difficulty automatically adjusts to reflect the active hash rate, which has already dropped by 7.76% as miners redirect their power to the AI. It’s a leading indicator. If more large operators follow Core Scientific’s strategy and convert gigawatts of mining capacity to AI hosting, hashrate could decline further, at least in the short term.
The long-term structure that forms here will be quite different. Hut 8’s Riverbend deal, 15 years, preferred counterparty, and Google as a financial backstop is more like an infrastructure REIT than a hedging mining company: stable contracted cash flows, long-term leases, and institutional-level tenants. If Marathon, Riot, or CleanSpark announce similar deals in the coming months, their model will become a template for the entire publicly traded mining sector.
Key dates to track: Anthropic’s new TPU capacity comes online in 2027, Hut 8’s first River Bend data hole is scheduled for Q2 2027, and Core Scientific’s 1.2 GW conversion accelerates through 2026. The question is not whether miners will continue to pivot, but how much. $BTC Whether it enters the spot market in the process and how quickly the network adapts to the hashrate coming out of it.
