Stories · as read on the AI station
Moonshot's Power Play: Bitcoin Sites and AI
The founder of a Texas switchboard maker walks through why an AI build costs far more per megawatt than a Bitcoin mine, and what that means for miners' sites.
It is a power play. That is how Ethan Ellenberg, founder and CEO of Moonshot, described the choice in front of Bitcoin miners at Mining Disrupt Dallas 2025. Miners own access to power, he said, and the goal is to get the biggest bang for the buck out of it. His company, a switchboard and panel maker in Denton, Texas, started in Bitcoin mining and now builds for AI as well.
Ellenberg told the room it grew from an office in his rental apartment to a 500,000-square-foot facility in January. He named Hut 8, TeraWulf and Riot among the public miners Moonshot builds for. Then he walked through the numbers. A Bitcoin mining machine runs about five thousand dollars, he said, and an AI server about three hundred thirty-two thousand.
Per kilowatt, that is about fourteen hundred dollars for Bitcoin against twenty-one thousand for AI. On a 100-megawatt site, his total for Bitcoin was close to two hundred million dollars. For AI, two to three billion. The difference, he said, is redundancy.
A Bitcoin mine is basically a tier zero data center. It is either on or off, and a miner can curtail. An AI facility has to stay up, at 99.982% uptime, so its electrical and mechanical systems are doubled or backed up. Location changes too.
A miner can go remote for cheap power and run on Starlink. An AI tenant expects two separate fiber runs on a diverse path, and Ellenberg said available power alone will not win top-tier clients. He showed the electrical difference with two diagrams. The Bitcoin version is a transformer feeding a 4,000-amp panel and the miners.
If it goes down, the miners shut off. The AI version is a nine-section switchboard Moonshot built for TeraWulf, with two utility feeds, UPSs, tie breakers and interlocks. The controls, he said, keep the two feeds from ever being combined and blowing the switchboard up. As he put it, "For AI, you can't lose power." Add a second lineup for the UPSs, and he said the electrical gear takes almost three to four times the space.
His advice to miners who want to future-proof a site: plan now for the space, the electrical infrastructure and the redundancy. The talk was recorded in November 2025, when Bitcoin traded at $104,994. Today it is $82,681. The full story is on Intelligence Disrupt at intelligencedisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.