Authored by Juan Leon, a cryptocurrency analyst at Bitwise
Translated by Luffy, Foresight News
I recently attended Consensus in Austin, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency conferences. With over 15,000 attendees, numerous industry experts discussed a wide range of topics from tokenization and regulation to monetary policy and Bitcoin ETFs.
However, if I were to point out the biggest takeaway from this conference, it would be that the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency has even broader prospects than people imagine. By 2030, these two industries could contribute $20 trillion to the global GDP.
While this won’t happen overnight, we have already glimpsed the immense potential that lies ahead.
Bitcoin Mining and Artificial Intelligence: Emerging Partnerships
You’ve probably heard about the recent AI boom, which has propelled NVIDIA (the world’s largest AI chip manufacturer) to a market value exceeding $3 trillion. This has made the chipmaker the world’s second-largest publicly traded company. Less known is the impact of the AI boom on data centers, which store the vast amount of information driving AI development.
The reality is this: the battle for AI supremacy has resulted in unprecedented shortages of data centers, AI chips, and power supply. The world’s top four cloud computing companies (Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft) are expected to spend nearly $200 billion by 2025 on building data centers to meet the growing demand for AI. However, new facilities are in short supply: a report from commercial real estate company CBRE Group in March revealed that around 83% of the capacity of under-construction data centers has already been pre-leased, with AI companies and cloud service providers being the main sources of demand. Data centers simply can’t keep up with the AI boom.
This is where Bitcoin miners come in.
The sole purpose of Bitcoin miners is to process and store large amounts of data. In other words, they possess the resources that AI companies urgently need: powerful chips, state-of-the-art cooling systems, and accompanying infrastructure.
Just last week, AI cloud provider CoreWeave proposed to acquire Bitcoin mining company Core Scientific for $1.6 billion, a 55% premium above its market price (Core Scientific later rejected the acquisition offer). Following this, Core Scientific announced the largest-ever mining-AI partnership to date this week: a $3.5 billion deal where Core Scientific will host CoreWeave’s AI-related services in its data centers over the next 12 years.
Core Scientific is not the only company doing this, as Hut 8, Iris Energy, and other mining companies have also announced similar AI hosting plans in recent months.
While this is a positive sign for miners, who may benefit from new revenue streams and a robust customer base, it also provides critical support for the larger Bitcoin ecosystem, which relies on these miners to process transactions and secure the network.
Beyond Bitcoin Mining: Long-Term Opportunities for AI and Cryptocurrency
In the long run, cryptocurrency and AI may intersect in other areas worth noting.
One area is information verification. While programs like ChatGPT have gained popularity (attracting around 100 million monthly active users in just two months), they have also sparked controversy and raised new questions. Who controls the content generated by AI? How transparent should this content be? To what extent does AI reflect or reinforce biases? In a world where “deepfakes” are prevalent, how can users verify the authenticity of media? (On this last point, the World Economic Forum recently stated that the “proliferation of false information” caused by AI is the biggest direct risk facing the global economy.)
So, what does all this have to do with cryptocurrency? Remember, public blockchains supporting cryptocurrencies are open for anyone to use, free from centralized entity control. Creative entrepreneurs are exploring ways to use this technology to combat potential AI abuse.
For example, we wrote about a startup called Attestiv in March, which creates digital “fingerprints” for videos based on metadata (such as the video’s recording time and location) and stores them on a public blockchain. If a video is tampered with, any platform viewing the video can cross-reference it with the original fingerprint to verify if it has been altered. In theory, we could see similar verification methods applied in fields like original research and official government communications. This is why many experts believe blockchain will play a crucial role in balancing AI.
Another area where cryptocurrency and AI could converge is virtual assistants. Nowadays, robots like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa can handle everything from booking flights to appointments, thanks to advancements in AI making these tools more versatile. However, if these agents cannot efficiently perform more complex tasks in the future, their versatility may be limited. Combining AI assistants with smart contracts and digital native currencies like Bitcoin or stablecoins (securely flowing currencies without centralized entity control) could open up new avenues to further enhance our productivity.
These developments lead me to believe that the fusion of AI and cryptocurrency will leverage the strengths of each field, reshaping how we innovate and interact with the world.
PwC estimates that by 2030, AI and cryptocurrency will contribute $15.7 trillion and $1.8 trillion to the global economy, respectively. While these two figures add up to $17.5 trillion, if their synergy produces compound effects, the total value could soar to $20 trillion or even higher.
