TEXAS HANDS OUT POWER — THE BITCOIN MINERS LINE UP FOR AI
The document is ERCOT market notice M-A080326-04, dated September 3. It tells every transmission and distribution provider in Texas which large loads made it into Batch Zero, the grid operator’s first group study of projects of 75 megawatts and up. Every classification is conditional: “Failure to satisfy any applicable condition may disqualify the Large Load from Batch Zero.” The applicants get fourteen business days to file their eligibility papers.
The scale, from ERCOT’s June 18 release announcing the process: 438,000 megawatts of large-load requests on its books, 89 percent of them data centers. That is more than five times the grid’s peak demand. Blockspace reported the September screen covered roughly 250 to 300 projects and about 200 gigawatts. ERCOT itself published no names, no sites and no megawatts. The companies did.
Galaxy, September 8, by press release: Helios I at 800 megawatts and Helios II at 830 are Batch Zero Base Load. Caspian at 700, Selene at 900 and Helios III at 1,000 are Studied Load. Add it up and 1,630 megawatts is in the study model and 2,600 is waiting on one. Galaxy calls the whole thing 4.2 gigawatts and describes it as “data center infrastructure to power AI and HPC workloads.” The word bitcoin does not appear in the release. Helios was bought as a bitcoin mine.
The rest of the scoreboard, as the miners reported it: Cipher 3.2 gigawatts, IREN 2 gigawatts at Sweetwater, CleanSpark 585 megawatts base plus 300 studied, Ionic Digital 466 megawatts in Ward County, Soluna 166 megawatts, Hut 8’s Beacon Point in the base tier. In 2021 these companies competed on machine orders and promised exahashes. Now they compete on who holds a conditional letter from a grid operator.
Who profits: the landowner with an interconnection, which is what a bitcoin miner in Texas turned out to be. What it costs: the study runs into 2027, the transmission plan lands in fall 2027, and a project that misses a condition goes to the back of Batch 1, which does not open until summer 2027.
Bitcoin does not care who wins the letter. The network ran at about 935 exahashes a second as of September 4, per Strategy’s own investor guide, and a Texas site that switches from hashing to inference just hands its share of the next block to a machine somewhere else. The gigawatts are the miners’ story. The coins never needed Helios.
At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $77,188 at 10:51 AM ET on Crypto.com.