HEATH MUCHENA | AI vs bitcoin: who gets the electricity when power is scarce?
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When electricity becomes scarce, an AI data centre and a bitcoin mine face different calculations. An AI operator may need to honour customer commitments and keep expensive processors working. A bitcoin miner may decide the power costs more than the coins it can earn and switch off. That difference could reshape the competition between two industries increasingly interested in the same resource: sites with access to substantial electricity supplies. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects electricity consumption by all data centres rising from 485 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2025 to about 950TWh in 2030. AI is an important driver, though those figures include other computing workloads. The immediate constraint is often local.
First reported by Sasfin Bank. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.
