Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, compared on October 17, 2026 the cost structures of Bitcoin mining and AI inference. Mining one Bitcoin costs approximately $93,700, with about 40% going to hardware and 43.3% to electricity, which are nearly equal expenses. AI inference costs approximately $26,260 per GPU-year, with 76% spent on hardware and only 4% to 4.8% on electricity. At the facility level, mining infrastructure costs between $700,000 and $1 million per megawatt, compared to approximately $20 million per megawatt for AI infrastructure. This structural difference implies that Bitcoin miners remain highly sensitive to electricity costs, while AI operators depend mainly on hardware efficiency and utilization.
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