Crypto Miners Cash In on AI's $3 Trillion Infrastructure Bill

Morgan Stanley projects that global spending on AI datacenters will reach roughly $3 trillion by 2029. Half of that goes to construction, not hardware. The concrete, the cooling systems, the power infrastructure, the networking equipment.

Goldman Sachs sees chips representing only about 25% of total AI datacenter spending by 2026. The remaining 75% flows into physical infrastructure. For every dollar spent on the brains of an AI datacenter, three dollars go toward keeping those brains housed, cooled and powered. Cooling systems alone can account for up to 40% of electricity demand in a datacenter.

The top hyperscalers – Amazon, Microsoft, Google’s parent Alphabet, and Meta – are projected to spend somewhere between $587 billion and $670 billion on AI infrastructure capital expenditures in 2026.

Former crypto miners are converting their facilities for AI compute workloads. The deals are not small. IREN landed a $9.7 billion contract with Microsoft. TeraWulf entered a $9.5 billion joint venture with Google.

A crypto mining facility already has the power infrastructure, the cooling capacity and the permitting in place. Converting it for AI workloads is dramatically cheaper and faster than building from scratch. When 75% of your datacenter cost is infrastructure rather than chips, having that infrastructure already built is an enormous competitive advantage.

Platforms like Akash Network, Render and Bittensor are positioning themselves as alternatives to traditional cloud services. They use token incentives to aggregate existing compute resources without construction permits, water rights negotiations or multi-year build timelines.

Decentralized compute is still a fraction of the market compared to what Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud command. The technology works for certain workloads, particularly inference and rendering tasks. Training large foundation models still requires the kind of concentrated, low-latency infrastructure that only purpose-built facilities can provide.

The IREN and TeraWulf deals demonstrate that the market is willing to pay enormous premiums for ready-to-deploy infrastructure. The energy demands of AI datacenters will intensify competition for power resources. That directly affects proof-of-work mining economics.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analysts have noted that the shift could compress margins for miners who cannot pivot. The window for conversion is open now, before the hyperscalers finish their own build-outs.