Vitalik Buterin Outlines Divergent Cost Structures of Bitcoin Mining and AI Compute

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin published a comparative cost breakdown showing that Bitcoin mining expenses are evenly split between hardware and energy, while AI inference is heavily capital-intensive. Bitcoin production costs total an estimated $93,700 per BTC, with compute capex at roughly 40% ($37,600) and electricity at 45.9% ($40,600+ to $43,000). Conversely, AI inference costs total approximately $26,260 per GPU-year, with capex accounting for roughly 76% ($19,900) and electricity just 4.8% ($1,260). The contrasting economics highlight why miners such as Core Scientific, MARA Holdings, and TeraWulf are pivoting power assets toward AI colocation.