00:00 Speaker A
Anthropic strikes 9 billion computing deal with Riot platforms. Riot platforms, one of the favored publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies that we can no longer call a publicly traded Bitcoin mining company.
00:15 Speaker A
All of our friends are leaving us because AI is cool and Bitcoin is no longer cool at all.
00:24 Speaker A
I mean, what we've got here is once again a continuation of Bitcoin miners, particularly the publicly traded ones, turning off their Bitcoin mining and turning on their AI data centers because they can make a hell of a lot more money there, and it's a much hotter narrative. So, in a world where you have blue states in particular saying that Bitcoin mining and data centers are bad, people rioting outside of their offices.
00:46 Speaker A
What you can do is take already built infrastructure that was perfect for Bitcoin mining and also happens to be perfect for AI and just flip the little switch. And all of a sudden you're making a hell of a lot of money as an AI data center and infrastructure company and no longer as a Bitcoin miner.
01:03 Speaker A
Now we've seen this from Marathon, we've seen this from Iren, all of them caught a massive bid uh on the news that they were pivoting to AI. And at first it felt like maybe it was just a narrative switch.
01:16 Speaker A
You'll all remember in the last cycle when there was a famous story of a company called Long Island Iced Tea or something and they changed your name to Long Island Blockchain iced tea. And because they put blockchain in it and it was so hot, the stock went up many hundreds of a percent overnight.
01:31 Speaker A
Well, at first it felt like that's what was happening here with Bitcoin miners that they were simply going to call themselves AI adjacent to catch a bid, see the price go up, but this is really a major structural change.
01:43 Speaker A
Bitcoin miners no longer make very much money mining Bitcoin. It's always been a very tough business, especially for publicly traded companies that actually had to report. Now, Riot reports that pre depreciation, they make uh that it costs them nearly $50,000, let's call it to mine a Bitcoin. It's $49,000, something, something, something, something, something.
