Powering the Future Economy with HPC & Bitcoin Mining w/ Fred Thiel & Matt Schultz | Bitcoin 2026

🎥 May 01, 2026 📺 Bitcoin Magazine ⏱ 27m 👁 367 views

Bitcoin mining and AI data centers aren't competitors, they're the perfect grid-balancing partnership, and this Bitcoin 2026 Conference Nakamoto stage panel proves it. CleanSpark Executive Chairman Matt Schultz and MARA Holdings Chairman & CEO Fred Thiel sit down with Nishant Sharma of BlocksBridge Consulting to explain how Bitcoin miners are unlocking up to 100GW of stranded U.S. grid capacity, why HPC contracts are riskier than the headlines suggest, and how the duck curve, peaker plants, and renewable intermittency all favor flexible Bitcoin loads. They also reveal how CleanSpark beat a $1...

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About Frederick Thiel

Frederick Thiel, CEO of MARA, discussed the convergence of Bitcoin mining and AI infrastructure in two July 2026 appearances. On the Bitcoin Magazine podcast, he described "mullet data centers" where AI operations occupy the front end and Bitcoin mining the back end, noting that lessons from Bitcoin mining—such as optimizing power usage—are directly applicable to AI. He stated that Bitcoin's price is "highly correlated to macro" and that further appreciation depends on macroeconomic factors. On MARA Foundation TV, Thiel said the primary goal is to "acquire electrons" and "generate maximum value per electron," emphasizing that power is the foundational layer for both AI and Bitcoin. He contrasted the operational demands of Bitcoin mining with AI, calling the shift "like going from bush league to major leagues." Thiel also addressed the Bitcoin halving cycle, stating that the subsidy and transaction fee mechanism was designed under the assumption Bitcoin would be used for transactions, which is not how it is currently used. He argued that until a transaction fee or other fee basis supports the security budget, halving cycles will make mining less profitable. Regarding quantum computing, he suggested that a superpower with a quantum computer would first target bank and investment account logins, not Bitcoin wallets. Thiel highlighted MARA's joint venture with Starwood as a capital-efficient approach to developing sites, and noted that tax revenues from mining operations support local communities such as first responders.

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Frederick Thiel's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (24 segments)

Nishant0:05

Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for coming here to the Nakamoto stage. Today our panel is about AI HPC as well as Bitcoin mining. How they both can help the grids or the energy infrastructure for better. And we are joined by two companies who are at the front lines of this transition between Bitcoin miners to AI HPC and everything in between. And we will be talking about a lot of things, but I will start with a quick round of introduction. My name is Nishant. I run a consulting firm called Bloxbridge. We own a media firm called The Energy Mag which covers Bitcoin mining space as well as now increasingly the energy infrastructure space. I'll let you take it, Matt.

Matt Schultz0:48

Thank you. Matt Schultz. CleanSpark is a Bitcoin miner. We recently announced that we plan to expand into AI data centers. We have 35 locations across seven states and about 1.8 gigawatts of active power capacity.

Frederick Thiel1:07

Great. Fred Thiel, Chairman, CEO of MARA Holdings. We're one of the leading Bitcoin miners. 18 sites across four continents, about 1.1 gigawatts of power energized.

Nishant1:20

So when people talk about Bitcoin mining and AI HPC, especially in the context of power, they often think of them as competing for the same capacity. They think of one versus the other, but as we have discussed before and as we read, they can complement each other in many ways. And we would like to know more about that. And so I would like to hear from the panelists here how they complement each other, starting with Matt.

Matt Schultz1:54

Yeah. So, Bitcoin mining is very unique in the fact that it's interruptible. Anytime that there's an act of God, an event that requires power elsewhere, or an issue with temperature that drives utility costs up, we can curtail our power very rapidly and the utilities love that. In fact, Duke University published a study called Rethinking Load Growth and it says that right now today there's between 75 and 125 gigawatts of stranded capacity on the US grid over the 22 largest utilities. The challenge is that it has to be interruptible one half to one and a half percent of the time. So what that means really is if you can shut off your power for 117 hours a year, it unlocks 100 gigawatts of capacity. Well, manufacturing facilities and traditional AI data centers are generally fixed loads. They're not interruptible. But Bitcoin mining is in fact an easily interruptible load. And I know MARA as well as CleanSpark frequently curtail our loads for the benefit of the utility grids and the communities we operate in. So the idea of securing a customer, hyperscaler, a Mag 7, whoever that has a requirement for a certain amount of energy, the capacity there they have, it's what's called the PUE, the Power Usage Effectiveness. And so they publish a peak number that says we consume X amount of megawatts assuming that it's the hottest day of the year, most humid, we have all of the systems running. But over the course of a year, the average PUE is much lower. So when you think about if you're a utility, one of our sites, I'll give you an example, 250 megawatts of power. To convert that to an AI HPC data center, you take the reduction in the PUE to provide the critical load. So you have 50 or 60 megawatts of capacity that only gets used five or 6% of the time. So the idea with the fact that they're complementary is that you can mine Bitcoin in that PUE. So when the power is available, you can mine and when it's not, you curtail and you push it back to support the data center. So it's actually a very complementary process.

Nishant4:18

Interesting. So, you mentioned that the Bitcoin mining helps keep the PUE constant or fill up the gap in between what PUE you hope to keep and what you sometimes end up getting. So Fred, maybe you can inform more to the audience about how the PUE is different between Bitcoin mining as well as for AI HPC, and also touching on how the overhead is different and then there's the PUE coming from the computation itself, how power dense the computation is. Because just from a very intuitive thought you would believe that Bitcoin mining would have a very low PUE because it doesn't have any overhead on cooling or air conditioners and all that that you need for a data center for AI HPC, but actually in the end the PUE often ends up being lower sometimes because of other factors. So we would love to hear and I think the audience will find it interesting to know what are all these factors that the PUE depends on.

Frederick Thiel5:27

Yeah. So I think you have to look at the nature of the load. So, Bitcoin mining is a fixed load in the sense that you turn it on, it runs, and then you only turn it off or turn it down if there's a demand from the grid that you curtail. As Matt was explaining, if you're running training loads, training is constant, then there's a drop, then it's constant, then there's a drop, it's constant, then there's a drop. And in that drop, you're not taking power necessarily. In inference, however, you have a load that is shaped by really the number of queries you're getting. So, as an example, if you're an Anthropic user in Europe, you have a very different token allocation for when you're running after 5:00 p.m. Eastern US time than if you're running before that. Why? Because the US capacity on Anthropic's inference systems is so high. And when US offices shut down, then that load drops and Europe can consume more of that capacity. So they're trying to load balance this curve of demand that they're getting based on queries. And if you marry Bitcoin to that, it works like a perfect way to create a fixed load, which to Matt's point, the power utilities want to have just this flat line. That's their dream. And Bitcoin mining can do that. Plus, Bitcoin mining is flexible. It can shut off. So, if you marry Bitcoin mining and inference and you can load balance in the data center, you provide the best of both worlds both to the inference company because you're balancing their load, lowering their cost of electricity. As a Bitcoin miner, you're mining with a subsidized cost of electricity because they're paying you for that service and the power company loves you.

Nishant7:18

So, you talked about how Bitcoin mining helps keep the load constant. We both, you both mentioned that and you showed different angles on how that helps the grid. And the grid loves flexible loads. Why is that? Why does the grid like flexible loads?

Frederick Thiel7:39

Well, I mean the grid likes flexible loads because if you think about how the grid operates, it's like the plumbing in your house, right? If you had a certain amount of water pressure coming in and you open your taps, now you're taking water pressure off the water utility system. But if you shut the tap, now that pressure is building in your system. And so if the water company kept pushing all that water at you, your taps would explode. The grid works the same way. If the power generators just constantly generated and didn't regulate their supply to the demand, transformers would blow up. The electrical grid would just short out. And so the utility companies are constantly trying to figure out how much power will people be using over the course of the day. And it varies. There's a thing called the duck curve, which is like the belly of a duck. Electricity consumption peaks at 9:00 a.m., then it drops midday, and then it starts scaling up at 3:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. and then it drops again. And so they have to match generation capacity to that consumption, that offtake. And Bitcoin miners are perfect partners because the power utility can say, I need you tomorrow between 9 and 12 to take all the power you can, and then after 3, I need you to scale back about 20% of your power. And so we are a perfect partner because we can act as that demand response mechanism for them. AI can't do that. AI wants to run constantly. So AI is what's called base load demand whereas Bitcoin mining is what's called flexible demand in that it can be shaped. And Matt mentioned the Duke study, curtailing one and a half to 2% of the time a day. That's the only time when the US grid uses maximum generation capacity and if you operate outside of that there's almost 40 to 50% of US grid capacity available and so that's where Bitcoin miners traditionally operate. And I think the AI industry, if you marry Bitcoin mining and AI, all of a sudden you can solve a lot of the energy challenges but the AI industry has to adapt to a world where they're dealing with more flexible loads.

Matt Schultz9:55

You know, to add on Fred's point, a lot of the jurisdictions we operate have hydro and nuclear and those are always on. And so there's this narrative that Bitcoin mining and data centers drive utility rates up. Well, the issue is once it's built and deployed, especially for those particular types of generation, I mean, Fred owns a wind farm. It's the same way. When the wind's blowing, the power is being generated and if it's not being used, it's being lost. So the idea is that if you can design consumption that meets the generation, now you're monetizing all of that power that's being generated for the benefit of the community, for the utility because that revenue would otherwise go unrealized. And so now it's power going to ground rather than revenue generation that can be reinvested in new capex and new types of generations. So it really becomes a flywheel if you can manage it and balance it properly.

Nishant10:56

So you both talked about curtailment and that's a very important point because as you both pointed out that AI demand is not so curtailable because people need their ChatGPTs running. They want their inferences all the time. Whereas Bitcoin mining you can just turn it off, turn it on and you can curtail. Now I wonder how anyone can measure how much curtailment flexibility is enough for the grid or the utility operator.

Frederick Thiel11:28

So the utility planners on a daily and weekly basis estimate how much demand there will be for power on their grid based on weather, based on day of the week, seasonality. They have years of history and they know that May 29th is typically a day of this temperature, so people are going to run air conditioning or not. So they have a lot of historical demand data that they can look at and so they forecast what their demand is and they then essentially purchase from generation that amount of power. But the fact of the matter is if you have renewable energy on the grid, meaning wind and solar, well, it may be cloudy that day and yet you'd planned for it to be sunny. So now you're running short of power in the grid. So maybe you then need the Bitcoin miners to curtail a little. Or maybe the wind is blowing more than you expected and now you have more energy all of a sudden on the grid and so now they're having to curtail something else. And so the use of renewable energy has exacerbated the problem for the utilities of balancing load. And if you look at in ERCOT for example, you had Winter Storm Uri a few years ago which was a total disaster for the state of Texas. And this winter you had another really bad storm but you had no disaster. Why? Because you had 2 gigawatts of Bitcoin miners that basically could shut down and give all that power back to the grid. And so they didn't have that crisis situation. And so all that renewable energy causes a lot of inaccurate estimates regarding power generation capacity that have to be modulated in real time. And you can't use a nuclear reactor to modulate your electricity because it's like you can't just put the accelerator button on a nuclear reactor and say up capacity by 10%. So you typically have to use thermal which are peaker plants which is like a jet engine in a building and you turn it on for two hours and you turn it off and then you can charge the grid a huge amount of money for that excess energy. Well, Bitcoin miners offset that. So teaching AI companies to build systems that can operate together with Bitcoin miners so that the Bitcoin miner can act as that curtailment buffer to the grid and balance the consumption of the AI load will be a huge innovation. And I think the other thing you're starting to see now is for inference especially, the data center operators are willing to come off the tier 4 data center requirement of five 9s resiliency because they can have multiple data centers that provide redundancy for each other and therefore you can save cost on build which means you can now do more of a modular model more like Bitcoin mining and I think you're going to see the two industries become more and more similar in what they do.

Nishant14:28

Now, taking a step back, when you're, so we talked about how these two complement each other, but let's take a step back and talk about when you're looking at a new site, what are you looking at when evaluating this new site and how does it change from Bitcoin mining site to a AI HPC site or even a hybrid site? Like what matters most to you, the interconnection, the firm power, the tenant demand, what factors do you consider the most when looking at a new site?

Matt Schultz14:57

So, we're I think geographically agnostic and the reason that we've approached it that way and the way that we built our Bitcoin business, the states that we operate in when the grid was laid out 20 years ago in Georgia as an example, it was the textile manufacturing capital of the world. So when all of that manufacturing and industry goes offshore, now you have pockets of power that these communities bonded their participation in generation and they own the opportunity for that power, but it's going underutilized. So we use Bitcoin mining and we talk about it internally about effectively plowing the road. Cheyenne, Wyoming. There was a hundred megawatts and 100 acres that came available from the local utility. There was a trillion dollar Mag 7 hyperscale client that bid for it. And there was CleanSpark. And CleanSpark prevailed not because we have a better credit rating or a better balance sheet, but because the other customer wanted to build a proper data center. So they agreed with the utility that they would take or pay that power starting in 30 months. Well, the utility has generation capacity and transmission capacity available today. So they're more interested with monetizing those megawatts now rather than later. And they care less about the guarantor of the offtake agreement. So the way that we built these relationships from CleanSpark's perspective is we'll enter into an agreement with a blockchain specific tariff. So we get a little bit lower utility rate with the understanding that we'll curtail and push that power back. Now we buy plenty of additional land in conjunction with that acquisition. So we can build a proper data center behind that. So, we're benefiting the community by buying the available power now, but then we can build a data center. And as we're buying that power, it generates revenue for the utility to reinvest in additional capex to build more generation. So then we can convert that to a firm load and switch that over to an AI factory and then take that modular immersion cooled Bitcoin mining facility, pick it up and plant it somewhere else and repeat that cycle.

Nishant17:18

That's a very very interesting point that Matt just brought up like it helped CleanSpark, as in Bitcoin mining helped CleanSpark secure this new site faster than a hyperscaler could have because Bitcoin mining sites can come up faster. They can consume that power that the grid needs to sell faster and also consume it at scale faster. Now let's talk about Matt. I would love to hear from you about how does the monetization hierarchy work for a particular megawatt when you're looking at a hybrid site which has both Bitcoin mining and AI HPC.

Matt Schultz17:59

Yeah. So I mean if you look at a particular site, there are basic requirements for Bitcoin mining which is just you have power available, right, you have land enough to build on, you don't need water for cooling in Bitcoin mining and you don't need high-speed internet because you can use Starlink. So that's a basic requirement. If you're going to do any form of AI you need some form of wired internet connection, ideally 400 gigabits of bandwidth. You may or may not need water for cooling depending on the GPUs or the ASICs that you're using. Some may be closed loop water cooled. Some may be open loop. It all depends on what technology you're using. And then there's a question of proximity to a major metro. If your clients are in major metros and you want low latency, you have to have a short distance for that fiber connection to connect to a point of presence on the internet so that you get low latency. So if you're trying to service financial services clients for example that are running trading systems on your AI stack, they want ultimately super low latency because it's all high frequency trading. If your client is taking huge amounts of data and processing it in a model and can wait hours or maybe a couple days for the results, then you can run that in a data center in Midland, Texas somewhere and then get the results back and operate at a lower cost. The key is as you look at a data center solution, what load can you run at that data center? Is it Bitcoin mining? Is it AI? Is it critical IT load, which is a mix of AI and CPU and storage. So that's one thing. Then it's what customer are you going to bring into the site and how you're going to monetize that. And then lastly, it's also a question of what type of technology is going to go in there relative to GPUs or silicon that you're going to run. Are you going to do it modular? Are you going to build a building? So, it's a much more complex decision, but you become much more of a developer, like a real estate developer, right? Okay, here's a piece of land that has power on it. What can I do with it? Am I going to build an office building? Am I going to build a hospital? Am I going to build a mall? What's the right solution? And then you go through that calculus and you figure out what you're going to do and then you go ahead and do it.

Nishant20:30

So, we talked about the operational side, we talked about how these two complement each other. We talked about how mining can be a bridge to a new AI HPC operation and also coexist after the AI operation kicks off. Now what we didn't talk about and what is an interesting topic are these contracts. What are the biggest risks that someone should consider before rushing into an HPC contract? We have heard of many headlines. We have seen a lot of stock appreciation of some companies who have made these headlines and they have yet sometimes to deliver. So would love to know what are these risks that you are probably considering while you're having these conversations today with hyperscalers.

Matt Schultz21:16

Well, from our perspective, we've worked through the basis of design conversation with the offtake client and we've gone to the point of review of the lease agreements. And what we found is that the penalties for even a one-day delay on a contracted ready for service date can be so severe that if you sign an 8-year lease and you're one day late, you lose a year of revenue, which could potentially be the entire margin on the contract. So, I'm certain that Fred has probably seen as many of the opportunities as we have and that while the headline and the short-term stock appreciation is amazing, the long-term value is a bigger consideration because at the end of the day, you're making a commitment to the community and you have an expectation to be able to meet all of the commitments that you make. So if you fall short and the company can't support the contract that it enters into now it's a loser for the investors in the company and it's also damaging for the community. So, a lot of the contracts that we've seen are a Neocloud with a Bitcoin miner, but it's wrapped by a hyperscaler. And some of the kind of surprising nuance, I guess, is that the hyperscaler wrap covers, they backstop that lease agreement, but if they're forced to guarantee that, that increases their equity at the site level. So, it does nothing to benefit a common stockholder. So, we've been, I think CleanSpark and MARA were both very successful at Bitcoin mining by being pragmatic and disciplined in the approach. And so, I think instead of chasing the initial headline, at least from CleanSpark's perspective, we've been really focused on the viability, the long-term viability of the contract and the ability to deliver the right product on time. You know, the last thing I'll say is that when we build a Bitcoin mining facility, and it's probably consistent with many of my peers, it's half a million dollars a megawatt and you have about one employee for every 10 megawatts of capacity that you have. You switch that to an AI factory and it's now 10 to 12 million a megawatt and about 80 people per 100 megawatts. So now you've got a massive impact on the tax base for real property, for personal property. You've got a whole new workforce that has to be trained and it's a massive build. So the challenges are you don't want just the headline of a transaction. You want something that you can deliver on that meets all the expectations of all the interested parties.

Nishant24:11

Makes sense. So we are out of time but Fred before we leave I would love to hear from you where you see Bitcoin mining in the broader digital infrastructure space in the next say 5 years.

Frederick Thiel24:20

I mean I think Bitcoin mining is going to continue to operate on a global basis. You're now starting to see more and more large international power companies being willing to take exposure to hash rate risk and partner with Bitcoin miners. Such that instead of just signing a PPA, which is a power purchase agreement with an energy company, they're now starting to be willing to say, Hey, listen. I happen to have so many megawatts or gigawatts of power in this one location and I can't sell all of it. So, I want you to come here and set up a Bitcoin mining data center. Maybe we'll do some AI as well and we'll be partners in that because just like in Saudi Arabia and in UAE, the owners of oil producing wells realize they're selling oil to somebody who turns it into plastic and fertilizer and other things and they make a lot more money there and so they start vertically integrating up that stack. And so the Emiratis and the Saudis have bought companies that leverage the refined products of oil. Well, it's kind of the same thing in the power companies. They look at energy and they realize this is the one resource that there's a shortage of in the world with electrification, with renewable energy needs, and with the advent of AI, they're sitting on an asset that they're underutilizing because they're selling it for a couple of cents a kilowatt hour when they could get more money if they partnered in and actually got into the data center business themselves. And so we've been very active in talking with the energy companies and building relationships. And I think four years ago at Mining Disrupt, I gave a speech about the power companies are going to own this business. And I think longer term, the power companies are going to be the only ones who can mine Bitcoin at industrial scale economically because every electron they put into Bitcoin mining is one they couldn't sell somewhere else. So it's free, right?

Matt Schultz26:25

And if Bitcoin reaches $1 million, then everything changes.

Frederick Thiel26:28

Yep. Absolutely. When Bitcoin reaches.

Nishant26:32

All right. Thank you. Thank you for your time, gentlemen. Thanks, everyone.

Narrator26:42

Every year, this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year, the stage gets bigger. Sound money center stage. So where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville, July 2027.