ALPHABET SIGNS 2.4 GIGAWATTS OF POWER LEASES WITH CRYPTO MINERS PIVOTING TO AI — GOOGLE JUST BOUGHT WHAT BITCOIN MINING BUILT.

Alphabet signed leases totaling 2.4 gigawatts of power across ten projects with crypto miners pivoting to AI compute — including Cipher Mining and TeraWulf. The infrastructure Bitcoin miners built to secure the network — cheap, grid-connected, industrial-scale compute — is now the primary substrate the AI hyperscalers are competing for. The Technologist read: Bitcoin bootstrapped the compute-per-kilowatt-hour moat. AI showed up with the higher bid. That was the story last week when MARA CEO Fred Thiel said Bitcoin payments had "seen its day." Now Alphabet is directly leasing the mining industry's infrastructure at scale. The pivot is priced. The remaining question is whether Bitcoin's network security absorbs the miner-capacity shift — which the difficulty adjustment mechanism is specifically designed to do — or whether it exposes a hashrate concentration risk we haven't stress-tested yet.