Bitcoin miners are rushing to sign deals with artificial intelligence developers in a bid to revive their flagging revenues by finding new customers for their vast data centres.
Crypto miners run powerful computing sites, often covering acres of land, where they solve complex mathematical puzzles in order to authenticate transactions and produce digital coins. But with high energy and computing costs, and with the rewards for mining having recently halved, many are struggling to turn a profit.
They now hope to benefit from a surge in demand for powerful but scarce chips — known as graphics processing units or GPUs — which are used in both crypto mining and AI processing. Tech companies are racing to get access to chipmaking giant Nvidia’s GPUs as they try to build more capable AI systems, and are increasingly doing deals to allow them to use miners’ chips or to put their own chips in miners’ data centres.