MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
There is a big shift happening in the world of cryptocurrency. Companies that mine for bitcoin are finding their resources are better spent on artificial intelligence. Our colleagues from The Indicator Stephan Bisaha and Darian Woods explain.
STEPHAN BISAHA, BYLINE: One of the Bitcoin mining companies we're talking about is called Bitfarms, and the CEO is Ben Gagnon.
BEN GAGNON: We had four co-founders, two of them from Argentina, who were actually mining Bitcoin and Ether in a small Argentinian hotel.
BISAHA: I feel like the stereotypical image of people who have Bitcoin mining for so long was, like, in a hotel room with a bunch of servers all, like, duct-taped together. That's how you all actually started?
GAGNON: I think it started in a basement. But, yeah, it was in a hotel for sure.
DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: Bitfarm has since moved up from a basement to big data centers. The company has a dozen of them in North America.
GAGNON: The energy is the asset. The energy is where all the value is. And the Bitcoin miners were just how we used the energy and monetized the energy. But it was the energy which was the core value.
BISAHA: So what I'm hearing is, don't call us a Bitcoin mining company. Don't call us an AI company. Call us an energy company.
GAGNON: Yeah. Call us an energy and infrastructure company. What we solve is the bottleneck on energy. Getting access to energy takes years in the United States, and so having that access to energy means that you can start moving a lot faster with greater certainty.
WOODS: Now, we should mention that both Bitcoin and AI use massive amounts of energy. That's driving up electricity prices across the country and often dumping greenhouse gases. And we know that is not good for the climate.
BISAHA: Yeah. Power companies are also looking to generate more electricity to meet all this demand. But for now, there's a limited supply.
WOODS: So if you're a company with access to this energy and you had to pick to use it for Bitcoin or AI, it's not hard to pick AI. I mean, it is the hot tech that is driving the stock market right now. It's how Nvidia became a $5 trillion company.
BISAHA: Yeah. Bitcoin mining, on the other hand, requires riding the Bitcoin price roller coaster up and down. Do that for years, and it can go from thrilling to exhausting.
WOODS: So you can stay on the roller coaster, or...
GAGNON: You can move over to a business that is not volatile and is predictable, has higher revenues, higher margins, higher cash flows.
BISAHA: I imagine it's a lot better for your blood pressure.
GAGNON: It certainly doesn't hurt.
WOODS: But all this talk about an AI bubble may be raising some investors' blood pressure. Ben's still an optimist.
GAGNON: We all believe in Bitcoin. We all own Bitcoin. So that's not a decision that anyone made lightly.
BISAHA: Talking to Ben as the Bitcoin believer, not Ben as the Bitfarms CEO, I - or, I guess, both - what does it mean to you to be a Bitcoin believer and be like, well, we're pivoting away from it?
GAGNON: You know, I don't know if there's a conflict there, right? Like, you can believe in Bitcoin, and it can also not be the right thing for you or the company. Doesn't mean I'm selling my Bitcoin. Doesn't mean I no longer believe in Bitcoin. But it just means that there's a better opportunity for the company itself.
BISAHA: So, Darian, this is a lot of AI future tech optimism. I mean, Ben Gagnon even dismissed AI bubble concerns by saying there was a dot-com bubble in the '90s, and yet we still have a massive web-based economy today.
WOODS: Yeah, if I were looking for optimism, the dot-com bubble might be the last place I'd look.
BISAHA: Stephan Bisaha.
WOODS: Darian Woods, NPR News.
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