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The $37 trillion collision of AI and Bitcoin

Welcome to AI Collision 💥,

In today’s collision between AI and our world:

  • AI and bitcoin, a romance for the ages
  • Figure Robotics IPO in 2025?
  • The two marios

If that’s enough to get the pirates sailing, read on…

AI Collision 💥

It doesn’t look like much, but the list below was one of the most important lists ever created in the 2010s.

The snapshot taken below is from 2010 and 2011, when I first started looking, researching and trying to figure out, on a cost-per-hash rate basis, the most cost effective Nvidia GPUs needed to mine bitcoin.

Back then something like an Nvidia GTX 560 Ti (which was newly released in 2011) would generate around 81 Mhash/s according to the list. Plug in two to the motherboard and you’d double the hashrate (theoretically). At about US$200, it would have been a high-spec mining rig.

What you’d then do was take the potential hashrate and plug it into the bitcoin mining probability calculator to figure out roughly how long it would take you to mine a bitcoin.

So in under a day, running full time, a couple of GTX 560 Tis would mine a bitcoin.

Imagine that: mining a bitcoin a day. Of course, in 2011 a single bitcoin was less than a dollar. So, if you specced up a bitcoin mining rig, say around US$1,500, plus add the energy needed to run it 24 hours a day (add around US$250) at a price of, say, $1 per bitcoin, you’d get a payback on your equipment in just under five years.

That’s a long runway, at a price of $1 per bitcoin. But of course, if you knew you’d be getting $100,000 a day from that rig and your payback would be 25 minutes and 20 seconds, then you might think of things differently.

I didn’t. I knew bitcoin would be around a long time, forever, and that its price would go up long term. But to be fair, mining was harder then, complex and costly with a long ROI.

But as the price rose, and thanks to bitcoin’s design, the difficulty adjustments in mining bitcoin rose, more miners came to market, and more advanced mining rigs were developed.

Quite quickly, the bitcoin mining industry sprung up and massive investment was pumped into building large arrays of GPUs to mine bitcoin. It became an arms race.

What was consistent, however, was that the GPUs of choice were Nvidia GPUs. They were the best, fastest and most efficient GPUs needed to mine bitcoin. Eventually, ASICs (application specific integrated circuits) came to market. Essentially, they are very fast and powerful computers designed to do just one job. And the competition for mining levelled up again.

But the bigger players in this space were continuing to invest heavily in the best, fastest, most efficient mining hardware they could get their hands on. As they grew in value, and raised capital for investment, they continued to spend up big on hardware. In particular, Nvidia hardware.

The demand for Nvidia GPUs became so great that the supply of them completely dried up. This caused secondary markets for GPUs to explode in price – sometimes two, three, four times their original cost. It also sent Nvidia’s stock price on a massive run.

At the start of 2016, Nvidia’s stock price (split adjusted) was around 80 cents. By the end of 2017, as the first really big “retail” crypto boom exploded, Nvidia was trading up at $5. – a speedy 525% rise in two years (and this was just off the back of crypto demand).

Nvidia stock price 1/1/2026 to 31/12/2017. Source: Yahoo! Finance

Bitcoin mining was officially a massive opportunity and a huge industry.

Meanwhile, no one was talking about an emerging area of research and development… artificial intelligence.

Of course, AI had been a technology development for several decades by 2017, but it had yet to make any meaningful inroads into the consumer markets. It was mainly the realm of Big Tech such as Google and Microsoft and was more out of reach to the typical investor.

Not long after bitcoin mining began to gather steam and Nvidia could clearly see there was a distinct market for its hardware with this emerging (and often controversial) area of interest, Jensen Huang, CEO and founder of Nvidia, made a huge strategic call on the future of his company.

Around 2013 Huang decided to focus Nvidia on the area of machine learning which is the foundations of modern AI. He could see the GPUs Nvidia made were very useful for crunching huge amounts of data and solving really hard mathematical problems – which is exactly what’s needed to mine bitcoin.

That massive bet from Huang set Nvidia on a pathway to greatness. This we are seeing unfold today as Nvidia becomes the most important company in AI.

However, nothing’s changed in terms of bitcoin.

In fact, for the last decade (and a bit) both bitcoin and AI have been on parallel pathways, with Nvidia quite often as their connective fibre. And as both have continued to ramp up in importance, investment and opportunity, a realisation has clicked into place in the marketplace…

These are no longer parallel, they’re at an intersection – a collision point where not only are they independently huge opportunities, but together they form one of the greatest wealth-creation events in known history.

You see at the heart of both is the immense demand for high-performance, high-powered, highly efficient processing power.

The power of the GPU, the power of the AI chip.

Source: Nvidia

But these AI chips aren’t just falling off trees in the backyard. They need to be developed, built, improved and sold. But the likes of Nvidia can’t keep up, so the demand is far outstripping the supply of these hugely critical pieces of hardware.

That means that AI companies in desperate need of AI infrastructure, of AI power, are scouring the globe to find access to this processing power.

Like I said, there is a collision point and intersection that we’re at right now with bitcoin and AI that is set to fill that gap. The realisation in the marketplace is that bitcoin miners aren’t just bitcoin miners anymore…

They’re also AI landlords.

There’s a LOT more to this story that I need to explain, and dive deeper into so you’re fully clued up about what’s going on, where it’s happening and the potential that sits at the table for risk-tolerant aggressive investors looking to capitalise on this gigantic opportunity.

How gigantic? Try around $37 trillion worth in the coming few years.

Forecasts from ARK Invest to Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter and Block Inc) say the bitcoin “ecosystem” could be worth $20 trillion by 2030. Add to that forecasts that have AI contributing as much as $16 trillion to the global economy and you get a feeling for what’s right around the corner.

I’ve spent over a decade immerse in both these areas, bitcoin and AI, and to see the opportunity that’s in front of us now is nothing short of history making.

And there are three companies I want to introduce you to that I think make that 525% gain from Nvidia in 2016/17 pale into insignificance as AI and bitcoin collide.

Also, even if you’re not completely convinced I know what I’m talking about on this subject matter, there’s another “easy way” to play this trend for any UK investor that takes no more than a couple of clicks from your personal investment accounts. You won’t even have to invest a single penny in crypto itself.

Head to my full-length intel briefing here to see my full investment case for the collision of AI and bitcoin and the emergence of the most important companies in the world right now, AI landlords.

Capital at risk. Forecasts are not a reliable indicator of future results.

AI gone wild 🤪

Robots in the home, robots in the workplace, robots, robots, robots everywhere!

There’s a lot of robots coming to market soon. We know this from as far back as March 2024 when Jensen Huang at Nvidia’s GTC 2024 spoke about Nvidia’s platform for robotics.

But who are the real leaders in this space? Well, I think there’s two key players, one you can invest in, one I expect you’ll be able to invest in, in 2025.

Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) is the first and Figure Robotics the other.

Elon Musk has been on the path to commercialise the Optimus robot for a few years now. It was first announced in 2021 at Tesla’s “AI Day” and in 2022 he went on record saying production could start “next year” (2023).

That didn’t happen, but the chance of it happening in 2025 are much better.

Recently Tesla even sent Kim Kardashian a gold Optimus robot. Now this might seem a tad silly, but her social reach is epic – and if Kim can live with an Optimus, surely we all can?

Figure Robotics is the other leader in this space. They’re developing robots, very similar to Optimus in key areas of industrial, manufacturing, domestic and interplanetary markets.

Or as Figure puts it:

Source: Figure

They’re already pushing forward at full speed to, with deployments of their latest “Figure 02” robot in manufacturing such as car assembly lines with BMW.

And recently, Brett Adcock (Figure’s founder) said, “I would within the next three years, we’ll definitely have robots piloting at homes.”

I think the public will be able to buy a humanoid robot for the house in 2025.

I also think Figure launches an IPO and it becomes one of the big IPOs for 2025.

I say this because Adcock has been highly active of late, posting about the Figure 02 shipping out to commercial customers. He didn’t name names, but I expect we’ll see more of this from Figure and a big campaign to build awareness and hype behind the company in anticipation of an IPO.

Add a dash of AI into the mix of these robots and I think you’re looking at another of the big investment themes and exciting tech developments for 2025 unfold right before our eyes.

Boomers & Busters 💰

AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week).

man in black suit jacket and black pants figurine

Boom 📈

  • WISeKey International (NASDAQ:WKEY) up 440%
  • Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) up 12%
  • Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) up 39%

Bust 📉

  • GuardForce AI (NASDAQ:GFAI) down 25%
  • Lantern Pharma (NASDAQ:LTRN) down 14%
  • BigBear AI (NYSE:BBAI) down 18%

From the hive mind 🧠

  • Is this the trial of the decade? I don’t think people quite appreicate how big this could be if Arm ends up winning this case and Qualcomm kicks up a stink about it. Make no mistake, the outcome here has the potential to change the entire direction of the smartphone industry and the rollout of AI.
  • This is a government with the biggest deposits of energy resources in the world with the world’s worst energy policies. So I don’t really know what people think when they come out with an AI policy when they can’t even get the stuff they’re good at in order.
  • OpenAI released their ChatGPT search a little while ago. Apparently though, not for everyone. But that’s ok, because now apparently it is available now for everyone!

Artificial Polltelligence 🗳️

Weirdest AI image of the day

Images of various things “before and after plastic surgery” – r/weirddalle

ChatGPT’s random quote of the day

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
— William Gibson, 1993

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to leave comments and questions below,

Sam Volkering

Editor-in-Chief
AI Collision
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Peter

It’s not really the hassle of setting up a wallet etc. The real reason for wanting to put crypto in an ISA is the elimination of capital gains tax liability, but even more – the removal of the necessity of tracking and reporting every buy, sell and conversion from one crypto to another – a huge balls-aching admin load.

Charles Cooper

Please can we have a written version of this

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