Charles Hoskinson: Crypto Will Eat AI as the Data Center Boom Goes Dark

Hoskinson's argument goes beyond computing costs, as he says blockchains could also provide shared rules for AI alignment and governance.

Charles Hoskinson says the cryptocurrency industry is about to do to artificial intelligence what it once did to cryptography, and he thinks the spending spree behind today’s AI data centers is heading for a bust.

In the September 16 episode of the Deeptech Insights podcast, the Cardano founder argued that blockchains could give AI payment rails, data ownership, provenance, and distributed computing as the infrastructure boom runs into economic limits.

Why Hoskinson Thinks Crypto Eats AI

Hoskinson said spending 10 times more on data centers every year cannot continue because there is not enough electricity to support that pace. Companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic also need to become profitable at scale, he said, with pre-training creating much of the financial pressure.

The developer compared AI’s position today with cryptography when he entered the industry, saying that cryptographers objected to being associated with cryptocurrency, a stance that ended once cryptocurrency had the money to hire the best cryptographers. He expects AI to follow the same path within five to ten years.