AI demand draws bitcoin miners as Nvidia says its Rubin architecture has entered production.

Bitcoin miners that can position themselves as infrastructure providers stand to benefit from the AI boom, while those reliant on traditional mining economics may face increasing pressure heading into 2026.

Speaking at the CES technology conference in Las Vegas, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform has already entered full production. He said the new system can deliver about five times the artificial-intelligence computing performance of Nvidia’s prior generation.

Rubin, slated to launch later this year, targets the fastest-growing segment of the AI market — inference, or the process of generating outputs from trained models. Huang said a flagship Rubin server will combine 72 Nvidia GPUs with 36 CPUs and can be scaled into larger “pods” containing more than 1,000 Rubin chips.

Efficiency was a central focus of Nvidia’s presentation. Huang said Rubin could improve the efficiency of generating AI “tokens,” the core units produced by language models, by roughly tenfold. The gains come despite only a 1.6-times increase in transistor count, aided by a proprietary data format Nvidia hopes will gain broader industry adoption.

Huang characterized AI development as an infrastructure arms race, where faster computing enables companies to reach key milestones sooner and forces competitors to spend aggressively on chips, networking and storage.

Impact on bitcoin miners

That same race is reshaping parts of the crypto industry. Bitcoin miners are increasingly pitching themselves as energy and data-center operators rather than pure crypto plays, highlighting their power contracts, cooling capabilities and existing facilities to attract AI customers.

For operators with low-cost power and established sites, hosting AI workloads can provide steadier revenue streams than bitcoin mining during market downturns. But surging AI demand is also intensifying competition for data-center space, pushing valuations higher as hyperscalers, cloud providers and AI startups bid for the best locations.

Rising rents, equipment costs and financing requirements are raising the bar, particularly for smaller miners. As a result, companies that resemble infrastructure businesses may outperform, while those dependent solely on mining margins could struggle in 2026.

Nvidia also unveiled new networking switches using co-packaged optics, a technology designed to connect thousands of machines into a single system. The company said CoreWeave will be among the first to deploy Rubin systems, with Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon and Alphabet also expected to adopt the platform.

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