Bitcoin miners that evolve into full-scale infrastructure providers may emerge as winners from the AI build-out, while those dependent on pure mining economics are likely to face mounting pressure into 2026.

At the CES conference in Las Vegas, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform is already in full production. The system, he said, delivers roughly five times the artificial-intelligence computing power of Nvidia’s previous architecture.

Rubin is expected to roll out later this year and is aimed at AI inference — the fastest-growing segment of the market focused on generating outputs from trained models. According to Huang, Nvidia’s flagship Rubin server will pack 72 GPUs alongside 36 CPUs, and can be scaled into larger “pods” containing more than 1,000 chips.

Efficiency dominated Nvidia’s messaging. Huang said Rubin could boost the efficiency of producing AI “tokens,” the basic units generated by large language models, by around tenfold. That improvement comes despite only a 1.6-times increase in transistor count, supported by a proprietary data format Nvidia hopes will become an industry standard.

Huang described AI development as an infrastructure arms race, where faster processing shortens time to the next breakthrough and forces competitors to ramp up spending on compute, networking and storage.

What it means for bitcoin miners

That same arms race is reshaping parts of the crypto sector. Bitcoin miners are increasingly positioning themselves as power and data-center operators, marketing long-term energy contracts, cooling capacity and physical infrastructure to AI customers.

For miners with access to low-cost power and existing facilities, hosting AI workloads can offer more stable revenues than bitcoin mining during cyclical downturns. But the surge in AI demand is also intensifying competition for data-center space, with hyperscalers, cloud providers and AI startups driving up prices for premium sites.

Higher rents, rising equipment costs and tougher financing conditions are lifting barriers to entry, particularly for smaller miners. The result is a widening gap: miners that resemble infrastructure companies may thrive, while those relying solely on mining margins could struggle as 2026 approaches.

Nvidia also highlighted new networking switches built on co-packaged optics, a key technology for linking thousands of machines into a single system. The company said CoreWeave will be among the first customers for Rubin systems, with Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon and Alphabet also expected to adopt the platform.