Vitalik Buterin Compares Bitcoin Mining Costs to AI as MARA and TeraWulf Expand

TLDR Vitalik Buterin shared two cost tables on X comparing Bitcoin mining to AI inference. Electricity makes up 45.9% of Bitcoin mining costs, but only 4.8% of AI inference costs. Computing hardware and related spending is about 76% of AI inference costs. TeraWulf has a 20-year lease with Anthropic, and Core Scientific has an AI deal with AMD. MARA and Hyperscale Data are also building AI and computing capacity. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin compared the costs of Bitcoin mining and AI inference in an Oct. 17 post on X. He shared two tables with cost estimates for each. Fun fact of the day: Bitcoin mining cost is split about 50/50 between compute capex and electricity. Meanwhile, AI inference is almost completely dominated by compute capex.

BeCrypto News shows a short excerpt and links to the publisher. The full report belongs to CoinCentral.