Apparently, there’s no more money in mining. It’s perhaps not a huge surprise, therefore, to learn that some of the largest bitcoin operations in the US are pivoting away from mining to AI processing. However, some of the details in this megabucks transition are intriguing.
Wired has visited just such a facility in the throes of said repurposing and claims, “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.”
Question is, is that a good thing or a bad thing for PC gaming? Or is the whole situation with PC component prices such a clusterf***, it really doesn’t matter?
Well, where things get somewhat interesting is this relatively unassuming observation in the Wired story:
“Bitcoin mining created the blueprint for the AI compute boom and the modern data center,” Wired quotes Meltem Demirors, general partner at the VC firm Crucible Capital, saying. “They have found that their cost of capital is much lower if they go into the AI narrative. They have the powered shell, they’re ripping out the [mining machines], and their tenant is bringing the GPUs.”
So, it’s basically the building, power supply, cooling and all that infrastructure stuff that’s being repurposed, not the actual mining hardware. Now, in the very early days of bitcoin mining, that would have had serious implications for PC gaming. After all, mining was done on gaming GPUs back then.
It’s many moons since one of these made sense for mining. (Image credit: Future)
If that was true today, you might wonder if the market was about to be flooded with a zillion used mining GPUs that could themselves be repurposed for gaming. Sadly, the reality today is that bitcoin mining has been dominated by purpose-built chips, or ASICs, for years. And those chips are only any use for bitcoin mining.
At least they were. Now that bitcoin mining has become too expensive to be worth bothering with, it seems they’re not much use for anything.
With that being the case, it’s presumably more cost effective to refit a mining warehouse with AI GPUs than build a whole new facility. And as the Wired article implies, bitcoin miners are nothing if not opportunistic. And so here we are.
Executing my own pivot back to the subject of PC gaming hardware, it’s hard to see how this changes much. The mining chips being ripped out are no use to us. The AI GPUs going in would otherwise have been housed elsewhere, just at higher installation cost. It all seems zero sum. And in the current context of bananas AI demand and an apocalyptic memory supply crisis, neutral effectively means negative. There’s no good news, here.
