Bitcoin miners that resemble infrastructure providers are likely to gain an edge, while operators dependent on pure mining margins may face a more challenging 2026.
At Nvidia’s CES event in Las Vegas, CEO Jensen Huang said the company’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform is already in full production, offering fresh insight into hardware he claims can deliver roughly five times the artificial-intelligence computing power of its predecessor.
Rubin, expected to roll out later this year, is designed for the fastest-growing segment of the AI market: inference, or generating outputs from trained models. According to Huang, the flagship Rubin server will house 72 Nvidia graphics processing units alongside 36 central processors, and can be scaled into larger “pods” containing more than 1,000 chips.
Efficiency was a central theme of the presentation. Huang said Rubin systems could boost the efficiency of generating AI “tokens” — the fundamental units produced by language models — by about tenfold. That gain, he added, comes despite only a 1.6-times increase in transistor count, helped by a proprietary data format Nvidia hopes the wider industry will adopt.
Huang framed AI development as a high-stakes infrastructure race, where faster processing allows companies to reach milestones sooner and pressures rivals to spend heavily on chips, networking and storage.
Implications for bitcoin miners
That same race is increasingly reshaping parts of the crypto sector. Many bitcoin miners have repositioned themselves as power and data-center operators rather than pure crypto businesses, marketing their energy contracts, cooling capacity and rack space to AI customers.
For miners with access to cheap power and existing facilities, hosting AI workloads can provide more stable cash flows than bitcoin mining during market downturns. However, the AI boom also raises competitive barriers. Data-center capacity has become a premium asset, with hyperscalers, cloud providers and AI startups bidding up the best sites.
As a result, rents, equipment costs and financing hurdles are rising, squeezing smaller operators. In effect, miners that look more like infrastructure companies may thrive, while those reliant on mining margins alone could face a tougher environment in 2026.
Nvidia also used the event to highlight new networking switches based on co-packaged optics, a technology critical for linking thousands of machines into unified systems. The company said CoreWeave will be among the first recipients of Rubin systems, with Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon and Alphabet also expected to adopt the platform.
