Jermaine on how it feels to be back with Big Blue 💙

Everyone is explaining the crypto crash with the Fed, Iran and ETF outflows. Bitcoin is down roughly 48 percent from its October high near 126,000 and trades in the low 60,000s. All of that is true and all of it is macro. The more durable story is happening one layer down, in the buildings where Bitcoin is actually produced, and the cause is artificial intelligence. Bitcoin mining was always an arbitrage on cheap electricity. You found stranded gas, curtailed hydro or surplus grid power, pointed machines at it, and minted a token whose value rested on a promise of future utility. The model worked because nobody else wanted those particular megawatts at that price. AI changed that. Training and inference want exactly what the miners wanted, power and land and cooling, and AI pays on the order of 1.5 million dollars per megawatt per year. Mining cannot come close at today’s prices. So the miners are leaving. IREN, TeraWulf and Core Scientific each expect around 70 percent of revenue from AI by the end of this year, up from essentially zero in 2024. IREN signed a 9.7 billion dollar deal with Microsoft for 76,000 GPUs and now holds no Bitcoin at all, by choice. TeraWulf has locked in 12.8 billion dollars of contracted AI revenue. Core Scientific sold 175 million dollars of coins in March to fund the conversion. Network hashrate has fallen below 1 ZH/s as the machines go dark. The market is voting with physics. Crypto burned enormous energy to produce an asset whose usefulness is still mostly speculative. AI consumes more, and grows far faster, to produce output the entire economy already pays for. Global data centers are heading from 485 terawatt hours this year toward 950 by 2030, with AI as the engine. The spare capacity that justified mining got repriced by a bidder with real, present, paying demand. The miners understood this before the market did. They are selling their coins and becoming the disruptor.

Just wow

Just when we thought only Freddie could kill this song, along comes George. Legends.

Karl-Anthony Towns has the highest plus-minus since the start of February.