Bitcoin Miners Control 27GW of U.S. Power, Sign AI Deals

Bitcoin mining companies control roughly 27 gigawatts of planned grid-connected power in the United States and have signed more than $90 billion in contracts tied to AI infrastructure, according to research from investment bank Bernstein. The AI-related agreements cover about 3.7 GW of capacity.

Bernstein’s analysis shows roughly one-third of those contracts are with major cloud providers. The remainder are with independent AI cloud operators and emerging neocloud firms. The deals generally combine power access, colocation and, in some cases, equity arrangements or hardware commitments.

Securing large blocks of grid-connected power can be slow. Bernstein estimates that connecting a single gigawatt to the grid can take more than four years in many states. Companies that need immediate, shovel-ready capacity for AI model training and inference face a timing bottleneck when developing new data centers.

Several miners have announced large partnerships that include equity commitments and hardware ties. IREN reached a $3.4 billion agreement with Nvidia that contains a $2.1 billion equity commitment linked to GPU deployment. Riot Platforms signed an AI colocation deal with AMD. Core Scientific and HUT 8 report contracts with major cloud customers.

Some mining firms are diversifying from pure crypto mining toward offering computing infrastructure for AI workloads. Bernstein currently assigns outperform ratings to IREN, Riot Platforms, CleanSpark and Core Scientific, with price targets of $100, $25, $24 and $24 respectively. Bernstein assigns a market-perform rating to MARA Holdings with a $23 target.

Not all companies in the sector are reporting gains. Canaan, a maker of bitcoin-mining equipment, posted a first-quarter net loss of $88.7 million, following an $85 million loss the prior quarter. The company attributed the weaker results in part to volatile energy prices and noted a shift in its outlook as demand moves toward computing infrastructure; its shares declined after the report.

Bernstein identifies power availability as a central constraint for many AI projects. Whether companies build their own AI cloud operations or contract with third-party providers, access to grid-connected, quickly deployable power is a primary requirement. The scale of miners’ planned capacity and the volume of signed contracts make them available sources of such capacity in the near to medium term.