A worker installs a new row of Bitcoin mining machines at the Whinstone U.S. Bitcoin mining facility in Rockdale, Texas, on October 9, 2021.s AI companies work furiously to improve the intelligence and usefulness of their products, their demand for cheap, plentiful energy has skyrocketed. This gold rush has been extremely profitable for an unlikely beneficiary: Bitcoin miners.
But the gargantuan success of ChatGPT beginning in late 2022 changed the calculus, and other AI companies raced to train and run their own models in the hopes of outpacing OpenAI’s flagship model. This requires a stupendous amount of energy: A ChatGPT query, for example, uses “You've seen a number of crypto miners that were sort of struggling that have actually made a full pivot away, and that may have been a function of necessity,” Draper says.