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.

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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. pic.twitter.com/PCFKZSuNRw

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 17, 2026

Buterin said Bitcoin mining costs are split about evenly between computing investment and electricity. He said AI inference is almost completely dominated by computing capital expenditure.

How Bitcoin Mining Costs Break Down

The mining table lists a total of about $93,700 per Bitcoin. Computing capital expenditure makes up about $37,600, or around 40%.

Electricity supplied directly to machines costs $40,600 per Bitcoin, or 43.3%. Other electricity costs add $2,400. Together, electricity makes up 45.9% of the total.

Labor costs $3,200 per Bitcoin, and facility rent is about $2,500. Other expenses, such as maintenance, insurance, taxes and bandwidth, come to roughly $7,400.

The computing category includes hardware, cooling, power equipment and financing. Its scope goes beyond the price of mining machines.

AI Inference Costs Lean on Hardware

The AI table uses dollars per GPU-year instead. Total costs come to about $26,260.

Computing capital expenditure is about $19,900, or 76% of that total. Electricity makes up 4.8% when all categories are combined.

Labor adds $1,400 per GPU-year, and facility rent adds about $900. Other operating costs total roughly $2,800.

Because one table uses Bitcoin and the other uses GPU-years, the dollar totals cannot be compared directly. The tables also do not set a uniform cost for every miner.

Miners with flexible power contracts can cut back when hashprice falls. AI operators have less room, because financed hardware keeps costing money whether or not it is fully used.

Several miners have moved toward AI. Core Scientific signed an AI data center deal with AMD.

TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease with Anthropic at its Hawesville, Kentucky campus. The site is expected to support about 401 megawatts and an estimated $19 billion in revenue over the initial term.

Initial capacity is expected in the second half of 2027. TeraWulf supplies power and facilities, while customers handle servers and processors.

Hyperscale Data sold about 100 Bitcoin and set up a Bitcoin-backed credit facility for construction in Michigan. Its first deployment covers about 20 megawatts under a ten-year agreement.

MARA agreed in July to buy a 1,200-acre Texas property for high-performance computing and Bitcoin mining. The site is expected to offer one gigawatt of grid capacity by October 2027 and two gigawatts by April 2028.