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Bitfarms to Shutter Bitcoin Mining in Pivot to AI - news.adtechsolutions Bitfarms to Shutter Bitcoin Mining in Pivot to AI - news.adtechsolutions

Bitfarms to Shutter Bitcoin Mining in Pivot to AI


Bitfarms stock fell after the company announced that it will shut down its Bitcoin mining operations in the next two years and convert them into artificial intelligence and high-computation data centers.

The company he said Thursday that its 18 megawatt Bitcoin (BTC) mining site in the US state of Washington will be the first to be fully converted to support AI and high-performance computing, with completion expected in December 2026.

“Despite being less than 1% of our total development portfolio, we believe that converting just our Washington site to GPU-as-a-Service could potentially produce more net operating income than we’ve ever generated with Bitcoin mining,” said Bitfarms CEO Ben Gagnon.

He added that the conversion will help the company as it expands its Bitcoin mining business in 2026 and 2027.

Crypto mining rivals Bitfarms have also started shift some operations to the AI as the sector boomed. Earlier in November, Bitcoin miner IREN signed a multi-year A $9.7 billion deal with Microsoft to give the tech giant access to its AI computing.

AI “best opportunity” for most US Bitcoin miners: CEO

Gagnon told investors on an earnings call that Bitcoin miners are likely to “rotate out to lower cost jurisdictions” such as the difficulty and cost of mining the resurrection cryptocurrency.

“One of the big dynamics that has happened is that public miners represent almost a third of the entire network, and everyone seems very willing to move to the higher economics associated with HPC and AI,” he added.

Ben Gagnon speaking on stage at a Las Vegas Bitcoin conference in April. Source: YouTube

Gagnon said Bitcoin mining is starting to look big growth in the Middle EastAfrica and Russia and added that “the best opportunity for most miners in the United States is really this transition to HPC and AI.”

“The economy is really going to drive that forward because the United States is the best market to invest in for HPC and AI, while Bitcoin mining is largely location agnostic,” he said. “It’s happy to go to cheaper places, to higher risk places, to more remote places than HPC and AI.”

Gagnon added that the opportunity for Bitfarms to move their Bitcoin mining elsewhere “they are really few” and not “a great use of resources or management time”.