The shift of mining power to AI: potential risks for the crypto market in 2026+

[Fortify]

Reading the news in 2025, I increasingly encounter discussions about the transfer of computing power from mining to the AI sector.
GPUs, data centers, and cheap energy are becoming key resources — and the competition for them is growing.
I would be interested to hear your opinion:
- How realistic is this scenario for market change?
- Which mining segments could be most affected?
- Could this affect the security and  economy of the networks themselves in 2025–2026?
- What are the economic risks for mining as such?
To clarify, I am not talking about the “end of mining,” I am talking about a tangible redistribution of resources and capital in the context of a rapidly growing AI market and demand for these services.
If there are miners out there, it would be very interesting to hear their opinion!

It seems like this has already happened but is also increasing in speed. You can see it in the consumer markets as well where lots of graphics cards have gone up massively in cost, at first this was driven by crypto mining but the next wave as you say is AI. Who knows how big this wave will get and if it will break, because it does seem like a lot of AI forecasts are quite high but this might not be true. It is in the interests of companies like Microsoft to dominate or try to grab a large market share in this field, but there is starting to be push back from people who don't want it shoved into every application where it is not needed. There is a danger of "overhyping" the new abilities that this tech brings us and you have to wonder how many of the promised improvements are already in place which might not justify the massive expenditures being spent in future.

[sana54210]

There are individual miners who will not really be impacted here. Yes, it might be for institutional miners having huge firms or mining farms setup. They will compare the profits and if they see long term profits in AI, then they will definitely think about moving their computing power from mining to the AI industry. AI sector mostly has their own data centres and has the required computing power to expand. They will not consider stealing computing power from the mining sector. I think mining will be as it is even if AI sector exists hand in hand.

There are few specific mining equipment designed especially for mining instead of just renting out the computing power. These equipment will remain the same and people will continue mining as it has been going once since more than a decade now. They might consider investing in additional computing power to support the AI sector, but they will not completely move away from mining.

[DrBeer]

It's all rainbows and sunshine until AI data center doesn't become profitable anymore and there is too much competition. The same way hashrate difficulty of bitcoin adjusted and make mining become more profitable than having AI data center.
This is called the game of rotating capital, if companies shifted focus to AI, soon enough the market become over competitive and their margin profit become thin.

Other concern is lack of GPU supply because semiconductor production is limited due to complexity and their capital needed to start AI data center will exponentially become more expensive making ROI longer.

Of course, and that's logical! But now, observing the fall in the price of Bitcoin and frequent forecasts of even lower prices, we get a picture of the mining market where, simply put, “mining has become unprofitable.” Of course, if a company has huge financial reserves, it can continue mining, even at a loss, counting on price growth in the near future.
  But... it is difficult to predict what will happen to Bitcoin in the next 2-3-5 years, whether it will repeat its “seasonality” again. The question is: what should the owners of such huge mining farms do, especially in the absence of free money, but with regular expenses for equipment, rent, and electricity?
 

[WillyAp]

  But... it is difficult to predict what will happen to Bitcoin in the next 2-3-5 years, whether it will repeat its “seasonality” again. The question is: what should the owners of such huge mining farms do, especially in the absence of free money, but with regular expenses for equipment, rent, and electricity?
 

Not much different scenario as the last bear market. I'm guessing they have long breath and won't need to sell or go chapter 11 tomorrow.
People looking for daily changes fear for total losses much more than hardened miners.

[MinMan]

I don't think GPUs can really be of much help to the AI sector. Usually, these companies are huge now and are still growing. They will always have better budgets and will have huge data centres supporting their operations. GPUs were overpriced due to the limitations on the availability of chips. Mining industry only increased the use case of GPUs but did not directly inflate the price.

People still use GPUs for gaming, and I have seen some really excellent gaming setups where people spend thousands of dollars on just the monitor. Imagine how much they could afford to invest into these GPUs.

For AI, I think more data centres will evolve. I think this can be a good business plan to tackle the AI hype. Setting up a data centre and renting out the computing power to the AI sector can make us earn really good profits and can also be considered as a long-term business.

Companies like Microsoft are already working on AI with their copilot or copilot plus which is integrated directly into the chipset, but these companies will not really think about expanding their data centres to support AI operations. Instead, these companies will outsource the required computing power, and this is where small businesses can evolve.

[DrBeer]

Reading the news in 2025, I increasingly encounter discussions about the transfer of computing power from mining to the AI sector.
GPUs, data centers, and cheap energy are becoming key resources — and the competition for them is growing.
I would be interested to hear your opinion:
- How realistic is this scenario for market change?
- Which mining segments could be most affected?
- Could this affect the security and  economy of the networks themselves in 2025–2026?
- What are the economic risks for mining as such?
To clarify, I am not talking about the “end of mining,” I am talking about a tangible redistribution of resources and capital in the context of a rapidly growing AI market and demand for these services.
If there are miners out there, it would be very interesting to hear their opinion!

It seems like this has already happened but is also increasing in speed. You can see it in the consumer markets as well where lots of graphics cards have gone up massively in cost, at first this was driven by crypto mining but the next wave as you say is AI. Who knows how big this wave will get and if it will break, because it does seem like a lot of AI forecasts are quite high but this might not be true. It is in the interests of companies like Microsoft to dominate or try to grab a large market share in this field, but there is starting to be push back from people who don't want it shoved into every application where it is not needed. There is a danger of "overhyping" the new abilities that this tech brings us and you have to wonder how many of the promised improvements are already in place which might not justify the massive expenditures being spent in future.

There is a view that AI could become the next “dot-com” global crisis. There are both economic and technological arguments to support this.
But yesterday I read an interesting analysis—a large number of AI systems were evaluated, and it turned out that only about 15–20% of their effectiveness depends on algorithms; the rest is down to the computational power available to the systems.
 That said, I’ll clarify: for AI, it’s not just high “processor” performance that matters (and these are now specialized systems, essentially “ASICs for AI”), BUT ALSO RAM, which is consumed at breakneck speed.