From AI’s Insatiable Hunger to Bitcoin’s Energy Harmony: North America’s Path to Technological and Monetary Dominance
This note was co-created with the assistance of Grok, an AI-powered thinking partner from xAI. #bitcoin #AI #Power #Datacenters
Personal Note
This article was inspired from great discussion with my mother-in-law, Karen Harvey retired 20 year plus Chicago Tribune photographer and journalist article Speeding technologies: It’s time to put the brakes on AI balanced with Alex Stanczyk Rumble interview with Daniel Batten from his podcast The Bitcoin Crucible … definitely worth the 20 minutes of time to truly understand how great Bitcoin is from a technological achievement for Humans as it solves so many of the problems we are collectively facing. I hope you enjoy.
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In the race toward artificial intelligence supremacy, the world is confronting a stark reality: AI’s computational demands are voracious. Data centers powering large language models, inference engines, and next-generation training clusters consume electricity at scales once reserved for entire cities. Water usage for cooling rivals agricultural demands in drought-stricken regions. Communities from central Mexico to rural Indiana are pushing back—hard.
In Querétaro, Mexico, residents report prolonged blackouts and water shortages after Microsoft opened a major facility. In Ireland, data centers already consume over 20% of national electricity, prompting moratoriums around Dublin. In the American Midwest, Google withdrew a massive Indianapolis project in September 2025 after overwhelming local opposition. Similar rejections and restrictions have spread across Wisconsin, Virginia, and beyond. The pattern is global: inflexible, always-on compute loads are colliding with fragile grids and finite resources.
Yet a solution exists—one that turns this liability into North America’s greatest strategic advantage. Bitcoin mining, long misunderstood as wasteful, is the world’s most flexible energy consumer. When intelligently co-located or integrated with AI workloads, it transforms rigid data centers into dynamic, grid-supportive assets. The result? Cheaper, more resilient energy infrastructure, accelerated renewable deployment, and a foundation for both technological leadership and sound money.
The Inflexible Beast: AI Without Flexibility
Modern AI infrastructure is spiky and uncompromising. Training runs and inference queries create unpredictable demand surges. Data centers must guarantee 24/7 power, forcing grid operators to build expensive baseload capacity—often fossil-fuel peaker plants—or risk blackouts.
The International Energy Agency projects that global data center electricity demand will more than double by 2030, driven primarily by AI. In the United States alone, data centers could consume more electricity than all energy-intensive manufacturing combined. Without intervention, this growth threatens brownouts, skyrocketing residential rates, and stalled renewable integration.
Communities feel the pain first. In regions already struggling with grid reliability, new hyperscale facilities arrive promising jobs but delivering higher bills and strained resources. The backlash is rational: why should local residents subsidize distant tech giants’ profits?
Bitcoin Mining: The Perfect Shock Absorber
Bitcoin mining is uniquely suited to solve this problem. Miners can curtail operations in milliseconds, ramping down precisely to match grid needs. Unlike aluminum smelters or steel mills—which require hours to safely shut down—mining rigs respond instantly and modularly.
This flexibility has already proven itself:
In Texas, miners participate in demand-response programs, powering down during peak demand to stabilize the ERCOT grid and enable greater wind and solar penetration.
In Kenya, introducing mining reduced rural electricity prices by 29% by utilizing off-peak capacity.
Conversely, Norway saw local power prices rise 20% after restricting mining operations.
Grid operators value this controllability immensely. Bitcoin miners effectively act as a massive, distributed battery—without the mineral intensity or storage limitations of lithium cells.
The Symbiosis: AI + Bitcoin Mining
Forward-thinking operators are already pioneering the convergence. Companies like Marathon Digital and others are building hybrid facilities where AI/HPC workloads run alongside mining rigs. The model is elegant:
Only 2–10% of total capacity needs to be allocated to mining to smooth demand spikes.
During high AI utilization, mining curtails automatically.
During low utilization or excess renewable generation, mining monetizes otherwise-curtailed energy.
The data center appears to the grid as a steady, predictable load—exactly what operators prefer.
This hybrid approach delivers multiple benefits:
Grid Resilience: Defers billions in transmission upgrades while increasing renewable hosting capacity.
Lower Costs: Utilizes forward-purchased or stranded energy that would otherwise be wasted.
Community Acceptance: Reduces blackout risk and residential rate pressure, addressing the primary objections seen in recent rejections.
Energy Abundance: Incentivizes new generation—particularly renewables and next-generation nuclear—creating a virtuous cycle of investment.
Duke University research confirms that flexible data centers could accommodate explosive AI growth on existing grid infrastructure. Without flexibility, we face a future of rationing and restriction.
North America’s Strategic Opportunity
China has already recognized the linkage. State-backed mining operations and hyperscale AI clusters often share infrastructure, leveraging mining’s flexibility to support always-on compute. Meanwhile, North America risks falling behind if we allow community backlash to halt data center development entirely.
But we possess unique advantages:
Abundant natural gas and renewable resources.
Innovative Bitcoin mining ecosystems already integrated with grids.
A regulatory environment increasingly favorable to both Bitcoin and domestic technology leadership.
By embracing hybrid AI/Bitcoin facilities, North America can build the world’s most resilient, lowest-cost energy infrastructure. This foundation enables not just AI dominance but a renaissance in smart manufacturing—robotics, advanced materials, decentralized production—all powered by abundant, affordable electrons.
Beyond Energy: The Monetary Dimension
The synergy extends to money itself. Bitcoin is energy transformed into digital scarcity. As NVIDIA’s CEO recently observed, it serves as a medium to harness, store, and teleport energy globally. Elon Musk has echoed this view: money tied to energy—something governments cannot print—is fundamentally sounder than fiat.
A United States that strategically accumulates Bitcoin—whether through a national reserve or Treasury-backed instruments—gains dual advantages:
Monetary Strength: A Bitcoin standard disciplines spending, reduces debt burdens, and restores dollar hegemony through hard-money backing.
Energy Leadership: Mining revenue funds grid expansion, creating a flywheel of investment that China cannot match without similar monetary incentives.
North America can lead the world in both intelligence (AI) and value storage (Bitcoin), anchored by the one resource we can produce in abundance: energy.
Toward an Abundant Future
The choice is clear. We can follow the path of restriction—moratoriums, rejections, and stagnation—ceding technological leadership to nations less constrained by local opposition. Or we can embrace the Bitcoin-AI symbiosis, turning data centers from community burdens into grid benefactors.
Hybrid facilities offer a compromise that delivers jobs, tax revenue, and infrastructure investment while protecting residents from blackouts and rate shocks. Regulators should prioritize flexibility mandates: any new hyperscale project should demonstrate demand-response capability, ideally through co-located mining or equivalent mechanisms.
North America stands at an inflection point. By harnessing Bitcoin’s unique properties, we can power the AI revolution without sacrificing grid reliability or community trust. The result will be cheaper energy, stronger grids, domestic manufacturing revival, and a monetary system rooted in physical reality.
The future is not one of scarcity and rationing. It is one of abundance—powered by intelligence, secured by energy, and backed by Bitcoin.
Good to connect with you Hans looking forward to reading some of your posts