Bitcoin Miners Race for Texas Power as AI Bids Up the Grid

HOUSTON — Bitcoin miners used to compete on machines: who ordered the most rigs, who promised the most exahashes. This week they competed on something upstream of the machines — a place in line for electricity.

Over a few days, a run of miners publicized their standing in ERCOT’s “Batch Zero,” the Texas grid operator’s new process for studying enormous power loads together instead of one at a time. A technical grid classification became a headline.

What the announcements said

IREN flagged conditional “Base Load” status for a 2 GW hub at Sweetwater. Hut 8 pointed to the same designation for its Beacon Point site. Soluna claimed it for a 166 MW campus. Galaxy disclosed roughly 4.2 GW across five projects, of which 1.63 GW cleared as Base Load and 2.6 GW sat in a lower tier still awaiting allocation.

The distinction matters more than the totals. “Base Load” projects enter the study already counted; “Studied Load” ones still face evaluation and could lose capacity. Even inside a single company, headline gigawatts carry different levels of certainty — Galaxy submitted a 700 MW project as Base Load and ERCOT provisionally bumped it down.

A grid classification, like a machine order before it, is a promise about the future — not power already flowing.

The number behind the scramble

The reason a queue slot is worth a press release sits in one figure. When Texas regulators approved Batch Zero in June, ERCOT counted more than 438 GW of large-load connection requests; by August the governor’s office cited over 474 GW, roughly 90% of it from data centers and more than five times the state’s record peak demand.

Not every requested megawatt will get built. But the flood means transmission capacity is now the scarce input, and the companies that locked in early study work have something their rivals cannot quickly copy.

Bitcoin’s role, quietly shifting

Here is the part that matters for bitcoin. Much of this power is being chased to serve artificial-intelligence and high-performance computing customers, not to hash blocks. The same firms that built their names mining bitcoin are turning grid access into a platform for a different, higher-paying tenant.

That is not automatically bad for the network. Miners that earn from AI can hold their bitcoin instead of selling it to cover power bills, easing the steady sell pressure that has weighed on the price. But it is a reminder that the industry’s center of gravity is moving from the coin to the kilowatt.

Why it matters: the fight for cheap power decides who mines bitcoin next — and whether they keep mining it at all.

Grid-classification figures and company disclosures are as reported by Miner Weekly / The Energy Mag and summarised by Bitcoin.com News (Sept 13, 2026). Classifications are conditional and subject to ERCOT verification. Informational only — not financial advice.