Elon Musk’s SpaceX Challenges Bitcoin Miners with AI Compute Power in New Deal with Anthropic

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has transformed one of the world’s largest artificial intelligence clusters into a commercial compute product, introducing fresh competition for Bitcoin miners attempting to reposition themselves as AI infrastructure providers.

Anthropic announced a deal to utilize the full computing power of SpaceX’s Colossus 1 facility in Memphis, Tennessee. The agreement grants Anthropic access to over 220,000 Nvidia processors and 300 megawatts of new capacity within a month. This expansion enabled Anthropic to double Claude Code rate limits for paid plans, eliminate peak-hour usage caps for Pro and Max accounts, and significantly increase developer request volumes for its Claude Opus models.

The partnership provides SpaceX with a high-profile AI customer, demonstrating to investors that its infrastructure ambitions extend beyond rockets and satellites. It also directly targets the market Bitcoin miners have been eyeing: the race to secure power for data centers serving AI firms that require electricity faster than traditional grids can supply.

Bitcoin Miners Face New Competition in AI Compute Race

For Bitcoin miners, the challenges are no longer limited to Bitcoin’s price, network difficulty, or the upcoming halving. The critical question now is whether they can compete with technology giants, neocloud providers, and Musk-linked infrastructure platforms in converting electricity into AI-driven revenue.

Miners Shift Toward AI Compute

Over the past year, Bitcoin miners have emphasized that their future depends less on block rewards and more on powered sites, long-term leases, and AI compute demand. This shift accelerated following the 2024 Bitcoin halving, which reduced the block subsidy paid to miners and tightened already strained profit margins.

CoinShares reported that the fourth quarter of 2025 was the most challenging period for miners since the halving. A Bitcoin price correction combined with near-record hashrate pushed hashprice to five-year lows. The firm noted that hashprice declined further in the first quarter of 2026 to approximately $29 per petahash per second per day, intensifying pressure on operators with older equipment and higher power costs.

These economic pressures have driven several public miners toward AI and high-performance computing (HPC) ventures. CoinShares estimates that listed miners could generate up to 70% of their revenue from AI by the end of 2026, up from roughly 30% currently. The firm also highlighted that public miners have announced over $70 billion in aggregate GPU colocation and cloud service agreements with hyperscalers and AI customers through early 2026.

Sector Divide: AI Infrastructure vs. Traditional Mining

The transition is already reshaping the corporate landscape of the Bitcoin mining sector. Companies like TeraWulf, Core Scientific, Cipher, and Hut 8 have evolved into data center operators that still engage in Bitcoin mining. Others, including IREN and Bitfarms, are using mining as a stepping stone into high-performance computing, while some operators remain focused on Bitcoin mining and low-cost energy strategies.

This distinction has become a key factor in investor valuations. CoinShares data shows that miners with secured HPC contracts trade at enterprise-value-to-next-12-month sales multiples of 12.3 times, compared to 5.9 times for pure-play miners. The result is a sector increasingly split between infrastructure companies with AI exposure and traditional mining firms whose earnings remain tied to Bitcoin’s performance.