Overview
- Vitalik Buterin published side‑by‑side tables on Oct. 17 that estimate mining costs at about $93,700 per Bitcoin and AI inference at about $26,260 per GPU‑year.
- Buterin’s breakdown assigns roughly 46% of mining costs to electricity and about 40% to computing capex, while it assigns about 76% of inference costs to computing capex and roughly 4–4.8% to electricity.
- The tables count hardware, cooling, power equipment and financing inside the compute capex category so facility and financing burdens widen the capex share for both industries.
- Companies are adjusting: TeraWulf signed a 20‑year lease with Anthropic for a Kentucky campus, MARA is buying Texas land and Hyperscale and Quantum have sold crypto assets or used Bitcoin as collateral to fund data‑center builds.
- The cost composition implies miners gain a clear edge from access to cheap, flexible power while AI operators must maximize GPU utilization and secure costly, capital‑intensive facilities, which could shift financing, leasing and grid competition between the sectors.