While Dallas Mavericks owner and "Shark Tank" host Mark Cuban noted that bitcoin miners will be impacted by the halving, he’s more interested in the potential impact of AI.
"But the truly interesting question related to halving is the GPU market," Cuban said. "Miners need more power. There is unprecedented demand from AI for those GPUs. Will that distort the economics of mining? Not just from the perspective of cost, but could it be a better business to use those GPUs to train models?"
That’s not to say bitcoin miners are unaffected by the growth of AI; rather, they have tried to embrace it.Over the last year or so, companies such as Xive and Hive Digital Technologies have moved into AI as a way to supplement their core mining businesses. Yet Mike Ho, Chief Strategy Officer at Hut 8 Corp, says bitcoin miners have struggled to find a home there.
He added that the uptime requirements for AI are very high and that networking requires a lot of fiber connections and complex engineering to optimize a lot of GPUs working together.