Vitalik Buterin's math: electricity is nearly half the cost of mining a bitcoin, but just 4% of running an AI chip

"Bitcoin mining cost is split about 50/50 between compute capex and electricity," Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote on X on Saturday, adding that AI inference is almost completely dominated by the cost of the chips. He backed the point with two cost tables, reported by Crypto Times, crypto.news and Crypto Briefing.

For bitcoin, his table puts the all-in cost of mining one coin at about $93,700. Electricity going into the machines is about $40,600, or 43.3%, and hardware, including cooling, power equipment and financing, about $37,600, or roughly 40%. Labor, rent, maintenance and other costs make up the rest.

For AI, the unit is one GPU running for a year, at about $26,260. Hardware is about $19,900 of that, or 76%, and the electricity going into the chips about $1,050, or 4%.

The cost of building capacity differs just as sharply. Mining sites cost about $700,000 to $1 million per megawatt against about $20 million per megawatt for comparable AI infrastructure, according to CoinShares figures from late 2025 cited by Crypto Times and Crypto Briefing. On Buterin's numbers, a miner's costs move with the power bill far more than an AI operator's do.

The two tables use different units, so their totals cannot be compared directly, crypto.news notes, and they are Buterin's estimates, not costs every miner faces.