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InvestNot yet confirmed elsewhere1 publisher2 min readPublished

Bitcoin miners are selling coins below cost to become AI landlords

Peter Schiff says AI bids against Bitcoin for capital, power and space. The contract arithmetic suggests that at the level of the individual site, the argument is already over.

The Investor · Invest desk

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What happened

  • Peter Schiff argued on X that AI is a competitor to Bitcoin rather than an ally, bidding for the same capital, electricity and data-center capacity.
  • IREN's $9.7bn Microsoft deal, TeraWulf's $19bn Anthropic agreement and Core Scientific's $14bn-plus contract come to $42.7 billion between them.
  • CoinShares counts more than $70 billion of announced AI and high-performance-computing deals across the mining industry.
  • Public miners have sold more than 15,000 BTC since their treasuries peaked, with Cipher and Hyperscale Data among those funding AI data centers from coin sales.
  • Cipher reported a $267.5 million net loss with mining revenue down 29% quarter on quarter.

Why it matters

  • constraint CoinShares puts the bottleneck in energised land, where permitting runs to years, so megawatts committed to a tenant for a decade cannot be bid back by a bitcoin rally.
  • cost Roughly $1 billion of reserves has been liquidated to build the pivot; holders owned that treasury, and the hyperscaler counterparties own the revenue it buys.
  • decision If AI reaches up to 70% of some miners' income by the end of 2026, valuing these tickers on hashrate means pricing the minority of the business.
  • contradiction The evidence offered for capital competition is crypto AI tokens rallying around Nvidia's 2026 GTC, which looks more like a shared narrative than money leaving Bitcoin.

A miner in the fourth quarter of 2025 spent about $79,995 to produce a coin that was worth $68,000 to $70,000, on CoinShares figures cited by Cryptopolitan [8][9]. At that spread, an AI tenancy is the only use of the building that clears. Hyperscale Data's week is the cash-flow version of the same problem: roughly 150.5 BTC moved for about $9.6 million [10], which is near $63,800 a coin, some 20 percent under what the industry paid to mine one [19]. Coin gets sold below cost to fund the thing that replaces the coin.

What the AI tenant is actually buying is duration. The 12-year, $10.2 billion contract sitting inside Core Scientific's total [23] works out at about $850 million a year of contracted revenue [27], booked a decade ahead against a commodity that was underwater when the ink dried [8]. The concentration is the part worth pricing: about 61 percent of the more than $70 billion CoinShares counts across the industry sits in three contracts [26].

One figure in circulation does not survive a check. The same comparison is used to say operators lost around $19,000 a coin [24]. Take a $68,000 to $70,000 price off a $79,995 cost and the gap is $10,000 to $12,000 [28]. Anyone sizing miner distress off the larger number is working with roughly double what the inputs support, which matters if you are deciding whether these companies signed from strength or from the edge.

Schiff's electricity leg is the one that holds, and not because of price. The International Energy Agency expects data-center consumption to move from 485 terawatt-hours to 950 by 2030 [15], an increase of 465 terawatt-hours, close to a doubling [20]; Galaxy cites Goldman Sachs forecasts of 45 gigawatts of US data-center demand by the same year [13]. The work itself is heavier per unit: about 2.9 watt-hours for a ChatGPT query against 0.3 for a Google search [14], near ten times [21]. US electricity demand is expected to rise roughly 50 percent this decade on data centers alone [16]. Electrons allocated that way do not come back to hashrate because the coin recovers.

Schiff's phrasing gives the promoters too much credit for coherence. He says they are "trying to hitch Bitcoin to the AI wagon" [6]. The wagon is being loaded with the miners' land and their transformers, and the fare is being paid in their coins.

What to watch

  • Whether TeraWulf and IREN disclose contract term and contracted megawatts, which would let their headline totals be annualised the way Core Scientific's $10.2 billion can.
  • Next quarter's miner filings: if cost per coin drops back below spot, the reason to keep selling treasury disappears.
  • Whether any of these AI leases carry take-or-pay floors, or leave the miner holding the interconnection and build cost if the tenant slows its commitments.

Clarity's read

What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.

Reality

Evidence34
Adoption64
Hype gap+22
Incentives62
Confidence38
Why these scores

Claim ledger

Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.

  1. [1]

    IREN signed a $9.7 billion deal with Microsoft.

    ReportedSupported2 sources— create a free account to open themView cited source
  2. [2]

    TeraWulf signed a $19 billion agreement with Anthropic.

    ReportedSupported2 sources— create a free account to open themView cited source
  3. [3]

    More than 15,000 BTC were sold by public miners after the peak of their treasury holdings.

    ReportedSupported2 sources— create a free account to open themView cited source

Sources

1 independent publisher whose own reporting we read for this story.

  1. cryptopolitan.com

    1 article · August 24, 2026

    Peter Schiff says AI competes with Bitcoin for capital, power, and space

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