Bitcoin miners are betting on AI over crypto

0:01NPR.

0:11This is Ian DeKetter from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods. And I'm Stephen Basaha. There's a big shift happening right now in the world of Bitcoin. And no, we are not talking about how much the price has plummeted in recent months. We're talking about a deeper shift, one happening underground that gets to the core of how the cryptocurrency works. We're going into the Bitcoin mines. The thing about Bitcoin is that it does not have one group in charge of making new coins, like the US Treasury for the dollar. Instead, Instead, the so-called Bitcoin miners solve complex math problems on computers. And if they're successful, a Bitcoin is born.

0:49It used to be that pretty much anyone could do this, in their bedroom even. But you need pretty powerful computers and a lot of energy. So today, it's mostly done by companies with big data centers. But recently, those companies are shifting away from Bitcoin mining to a new technology. Yes, it is the great disruptor of the entire economy, and it's shaking up Bitcoin too. They're switching to AI. AI comes for us all. So on today's show, why these companies are putting down their virtual pickaxes and becoming landlords in the world of AI.

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2:08All the professionals you need to reach in one place. Get a$250 credit on your next campaign so you can try it yourself. Just go to linkedin.com slash nprpod. That's linkedin.com slash nprpod. Terms and conditions apply. Only on LinkedIn ads. One of the Bitcoin mining companies we're talking about is called Bitfarms. And the CEO is Ben Gagnon. We had four co-founders, two of them from Argentina, who were actually mining Bitcoin and Ether in a small Argentinian hotel. I feel like the stereotypical image of people who have Bitcoin mining for so long was in a hotel room with a bunch of servers all duct taped together.

2:49That's how you all actually started? I think it started in a basement, but yeah, it was in a hotel for sure. Bitfarm has since moved up from a basement to big data centers. The company has a dozen of them in North America. And Bitfarm is far from the only company that's grown since those underground days. Different estimates put the market size for crypto mining last year at around$1.5 to over$2 billion. But that market size could end up shrinking. Companies like Iron Riot, Terrowolf and Cipher Mining have all recently announced moves away from mining to running data centers for AI. What is the future of Bitcoin mining at Bitfarm?

3:30Well, we're actually scaling back the Bitcoin mining business quite aggressively. We've sold off a number of sites. Likely over the next year or two, the Bitcoin mining business is going to completely wind up. I mean, the name is Bitfarms. What is Bitfarms without the Bitcoin? Well, you know, bits are not specific to Bitcoin, right? AI uses bits. OK, good comeback. And, you know, bits are actually a pretty useful way of thinking about this. Some bits can, at the end of the day, hold an electric charge, and that is the fuel needed for Bitcoin miners to get ahead. That's especially true in the AI race as well.

4:11Yeah, and what's important to know, though, is that Bitcoin miners, they don't actually make energy. Instead, they have agreements with power companies to buy power, something Ben says can take a long time to negotiate. The energy is the asset. The energy is where all the value is. And the Bitcoin miners were just how we use the energy and monetize the energy. But it was the energy which was the core value. So what I'm hearing is, don't call us a Bitcoin mining company. Don't call us an AI company. Call us an energy company. Yeah, call us an energy and infrastructure company. What we solve is the bottleneck on energy, right?

4:46And getting access to energy takes years in the United States. And so having that access to energy means that you can start moving a lot faster with greater certainty. Now, we should mention that both Bitcoin and AI use massive amounts of energy. That's driving up electricity prices across the country and often dumping greenhouse gases. And we know that is not good for the climate. Yeah, power companies are also looking to generate more electricity to meet all this demand. But for now, there's a limited supply. So if you're a company with access to this energy and you had to pick to use it for Bitcoin or AI, it's not hard to pick AI.

5:26I mean, it is the hot tech that is driving the stock market right now. It's how NVIDIA became a$5 trillion company. Yeah, Bitcoin mining, on the other hand, requires riding the Bitcoin price roller coaster up and down. Do that for years and it can go from thrilling to exhausting. Bitcoin mining is so volatile that it's really hard to forecast how you want to grow the company over the next, you know, even two years. Like you're looking at a 12 month or less time frame and something could happen tomorrow, which means that your plans don't make sense anymore. So you can stay on the roller coaster or?

6:06You can move over to a business that is not volatile and is predictable, has higher revenues, higher margins, higher cash flows. Imagine it's a lot better for your blood pressure. Certainly doesn't hurt. Good for his blood pressure, maybe. But all of this AI bubble talk we've been hearing lately is raising the blood pressure of lots of investors. Now, Ben is not too worried about a bubble. And interestingly, even with this switch, he is still a believer in Bitcoin. He's the optimist. We're all Bitcoiners here at this company. We are all joined a Bitcoin company. We all believe in Bitcoin. We all own Bitcoin.

6:45So that's not a decision that anyone made lightly. Talking to Ben as the Bitcoin believer and not Ben as the Bitfarm CEO, or I guess both, what does it mean to you to be a Bitcoin believer and be like, well, we're pivoting away from it? You know, I don't know if there's a conflict there, right? Like you can believe in Bitcoin and it can also not be the right thing for you or the company to do with your assets and your strategy. Doesn't mean I'm selling my Bitcoin, doesn't mean I no longer believe in Bitcoin, but it just means that there's a better opportunity for the company itself. Not all the miners are packing up their virtual pickaxes.

7:24And ironically, one company keeping it going isn't even one of those Bitcoin believers. Bitcoin mining for us today is extremely cash flow generative. Aussies know a lot about mining. Yeah, and that Aussie is Kent Draper. He's the chief commercial officer at IREN, which is another company that mines Bitcoin. Even with the recent falls in the Bitcoin price, still generating large amounts of cash for us. Now, IREN was not actually formed to mine Bitcoin. Instead, the company was created seven years ago essentially as a bet. Yeah, the bet was that in this rapidly growing tech world, there was going to be a need for advanced data centers.

8:04So Iron built those centers and then put them to use on whatever computing task would make the most money. And historically, that was Bitcoin mining. Only recently has that shifted over to AI and Kent is confident that next year, AI will be Iron's main moneymaker. But he's also not committing all his eggs to the AI basket. Bitcoin mining is one revenue stream and AI is now a second, third based on how you break up the business. And as new technologies continue to emerge, Kent's sticking with that bet that there will be more uses for big computers and lots of energy that we can't even dream of today.

8:42If you rewind even five years ago, I mean, AI as it is today was a twinkle in the eye of a bunch of R &D people. So if you fast forward 10 years from now, who knows what the use cases could be. But we feel as if we're sitting in a great spot where we have access to this amazing data center platform, as well as renewable energy at large scale. All right. So don't call it a pivot, call it a diversifying? diversifying? Yeah, I mean, we consistently tell people for us, it's not a pivot. It's just an ongoing evolution of the platform. So that's certainly how we like to think of it. So Darian, this is a lot of AI future tech optimism.

9:30I mean, Ben Gagnon even dismissed AI bubble concerns by saying there was a dot-com bubble in the 90s, and yet we still have a massive web-based economy today. Yeah, if I were looking for optimism, the dot-com bubble might be the last place I'd lurk. Tomorrow, we'll have a conversation about what a similar crash could mean now, and it's not pretty. This episode was produced by Cooper Kassman-Kim and engineered by Debbie Daughtry. It was fact-checked by Sierra Wattes. Kate Kacannon is our editor. The Indicator is a production of NPR.

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