Anthropic, an AI research company, announced its partnership with Alphabet’s Google and Broadcom for gigawatts of tensor processing capacity to power its Claude models amid rising global demand.
The new compute capacity is expected to come online in 2027. ‘This groundbreaking partnership with Google and Broadcom is a continuation of our disciplined approach to scaling infrastructure: we are building the capacity necessary to serve the exponential growth we have seen in our customer base while also enabling Claude to define the frontier of AI development,’ said Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao in a Monday press release. ‘We are making our most significant compute commitment to date to keep pace with our unprecedented growth.’
Anthropic added that demand from Claude clients continued to rise in 2026 as run-rate revenue surged over $30 billion compared with $9 billion at the end of 2025. Most of the new compute infrastructure will be in the US. The company highlighted that clients spending over $1 million annually on Claude doubled to 1,000 from 500 within two months.
Official Anthropic website
This mega deal amid the rising AI compute demand could mean that companies like Anthropic are directly competing with bitcoin miners for the same energy resources, such as grid connections, land permits, cooling infrastructure, and cheap electricity.
Mine BTC or Rent Infrastructure to AI Firms?
Anthropic’s latest deal on top of existing capacity across Amazon Web Services Trainium, Google TPUs, and Nvidia GPUs implies that these companies are outbidding Bitcoin miners for energy resources. For Anthropic, compute is a ‘strategic moat’ as it continues to expand its infrastructure portfolio covering multiple cloud providers and chip platforms.
The total AI compute buildout now accounts for one of the top sources of new electricity demand in the US, leaving miners to decide whether to mine bitcoin or rent their infrastructure to AI companies.
The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index revealed that Bitcoin mining requires 9.13 to 29.88 gigawatts of constant energy. Revenue generated by a Bitcoin miner with 1GW of infrastructure depends on the digital asset’s price per token and network difficulty. However, the same gigawatt rented to an AI firm earns a fixed contracted rate with cash flows that miners can forecast.
Recently, Core Scientific also converted a considerable portion of Bitcoin-mining capacity to AI hosting. At the same time, companies like Riot Platforms and Genius Group recently sold over 19,000 Bitcoins, which could further indicate that crypto mining economics might not be sustaining operations at current prices.
At $68,277 per Bitcoin, with difficulty at record highs amid rising energy costs and AI companies competing for the same energy resources, it could mean that renting infrastructure to AI firms could make more sense in terms of revenue.
In all, crypto miners could appear more like infrastructure firms that mine Bitcoin as well as rent their compute power to AI firms that cannot develop data centres fast enough.
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