Left hand BTC, right hand AI computing power—the gold and oil of the digital intelligence era
TechFlow Selected TechFlow Selected
Left hand BTC, right hand AI computing power—the gold and oil of the digital intelligence era
Those early pioneers who first bet on computing power and BTC will also play the role of new "oil tycoons" in this transformation, redefining the distribution of wealth and power in the new cycle.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Jademont, Evan Lu, Waterdrip Capital
Reviewing the Volatile 2025 and the Future AI Long Cycle
A New Industrial Revolution: Computing Power as the Engine of the Economy
"In this world, only a rare few can be like Edwin Drake, accidentally ushering in an era that changes human history... His drill rod penetrating deep into the earth touched not just black liquid, but the artery of modern industrial civilization."
In 1859, amid the mud of Pennsylvania, people mocked Colonel Edwin Drake. At a time when global lighting still relied on increasingly scarce whale oil, Drake insisted that underground "naphtha" could be extracted at scale—an idea widely considered delusional. No one imagined that the emergence of oil would not only replace whale oil as an energy source for illumination, but become the foundation upon which humanity’s struggle for influence unfolded over the next two centuries, reshaping global power structures and geopolitics for a hundred years to come. Human history turned a corner: old wealth depended on trade and shipping; new wealth rose with railways and energy—oil.
In 2025, we are immersed in an eerily similar game. This time, however, what gushes forth is computing power flowing through silicon chips, and the new “gold” is code inscribed on chains. The new age’s “gold” and “oil”—computing power and blockchain—are redefining our consensus about productivity and value-storage assets. Looking back at 2025, markets experienced unexpectedly severe volatility. Trump’s aggressive tariff policies forced a global supply chain realignment, triggering a major inflation rebound. Gold surged past $4,500 amid geopolitical uncertainty. The crypto market began the year with the epic利好 (positive catalyst) of the GENIUS Act, only to suffer margin liquidations and mass bankruptcies in early October.
Beyond the noise of macro fluctuations, industry consensus around AI computing power is rapidly forming: Nvidia, the quintessential "water seller" of AI, reached a landmark market cap of $5 trillion in October. Meanwhile, tech giants Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have collectively invested nearly $300 billion in AI infrastructure this year alone. Elon Musk's xAI is set to complete a million-GPU-scale cluster by year-end—a clear signal of where the future lies. xAI built the world’s largest AI data center in Memphis in under six months and plans to expand it to house one million GPUs by the end of the year.
The Digital-Intelligence Era: The Main Theme of the Next Industrial Revolution
Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, once said: "The market is like a machine—you can understand how it works, but you can never precisely predict its behavior." Despite randomness and unpredictability in the macro environment, one thing remains undeniable: AI continues to be the primary long-term growth channel in U.S. equity markets. Over the next decade, AI technology has become the most critical gear in the market machine, continuously impacting governments, enterprises, and individuals alike.
Though debate over an "AI bubble" persists, many institutions warn that AI investment mania shows signs of frothiness. Morgan Stanley Research noted that in 2025, surging AI investments led to soaring valuations in tech stocks while productivity gains remained elusive—an imbalance reminiscent of the dot-com bubble of the 1990s.
Yet an unavoidable truth emerges: the AI-driven productivity revolution is entering a phase of tangible monetization. From an investment standpoint, AI is no longer just a narrative for tech giants. The efficiency gains and cost optimizations it delivers are now key drivers behind profitability and productivity improvements across non-tech sectors. But this progress comes at a steep price: massive job displacement. AI’s replacement of labor—especially white-collar workers—is inevitable. Entry-level roles are being cut en masse; basic coding, accounting audits, junior management consulting, and legal work are among the first to be automated.
As AI adoption deepens, unemployment risks accumulate across healthcare, education, and retail. A grim joke now circulates in U.S. investment circles: software engineers will soon be what civil engineers are today. As Elon Musk emphasized in interviews, AI may eventually replace all human jobs. Yet this also heralds the arrival of a new industrial age—the Digital-Intelligence Era.
Looking Ahead to 2026: Demand for AI Will Continue to Expand
Four Stages of AI Industry Investment
As the AI boom moves from concept to widespread adoption across industries—and after the MAG7 (seven dominant U.S. tech giants) have been fully priced by the market—where does the next wave of AI-driven growth lie? Goldman Sachs equity strategist Ryan Hammond proposed a "four-stage model of AI investment," outlining the path forward: AI investment will progress sequentially through chips, infrastructure, revenue enablement, and productivity enhancement.
Four-Stage Model of AI Investment
Source: https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/ai-infrastructure-stocks-poised-to-be-next-phase
Currently, the AI industry stands at the intersection between infrastructure expansion and application deployment—the transition from Stage 2 to Stage 3. Demand for AI infrastructure is exploding:
- By 2030, global data centers’ electricity demand is projected to increase by 165%
- From 2023 to 2030, U.S. data center power demand will grow at a CAGR of 15%, increasing their share of total U.S. electricity consumption from 3% today to 8% by 2030.
- Global cumulative spending on data centers and hardware is expected to reach $3 trillion by 2028.
Goldman Sachs Forecast: U.S. Data Center Electricity Demand
Image Source: https://www.goldmansachs.com/pdfs/insights/pages/generational-growth-ai-data-centers-and-the-coming-us-power-surge/report.pdf
Meanwhile, the generative AI application market is experiencing explosive growth, projected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2032. In the short term, training infrastructure will drive a compound annual growth rate of 42%. In the medium to long term, growth momentum will shift toward inference hardware for large language models (LLMs), digital advertising, and professional software and services.
Bloomberg: Generative AI Growth Forecast Over the Next Decade
Data Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/company/press/generative-ai-to-become-a-1-3-trillion-market-by-2032-research-finds
This thesis will be tested in 2026. In Goldman Sachs’ latest macro outlook for 2026, it was stated that 2026 will be the "year of ROI realization" for AI—AI will deliver meaningful cost reductions for 80% of non-tech companies in the S&P 500 index. This will verify whether AI can qualitatively transform from "potential" to actual "performance" on corporate balance sheets.
Therefore, over the next 2–3 years, market focus will expand beyond individual tech giants to include deeper layers: downward into AI infrastructure (electricity, computing hardware, data centers), and upward toward diversified industry players successfully converting AI into profit growth.
AI Computing Power Is the "New Oil," BTC Is the "New Gold"
If AI computing power is the "new oil" of the digital-intelligence era, powering exponential leaps in productivity, then BTC (Bitcoin) will be the "new gold"—the ultimate foundation for value anchoring and credit settlement.
AI, as an independent economic agent, does not need the human banking system. Its only requirement is energy. BTC, in turn, is a pure "digital energy storage device." In the future, AI will serve as the economy’s "fuel," while BTC becomes the "anchor" beneath economic value. BTC issuance is entirely determined by Proof-of-Work (PoW), which consumes electricity—a mechanism perfectly aligned with AI’s essence of transforming power into intelligence.
Secondly, AI computing power—as a consumptive productive asset—derives its core cost from electricity and its value output from algorithmic efficiency. BTC, as a decentralized store of value, represents the monetization of energy and naturally functions as a "buffer reservoir" to balance global spatial and temporal disparities in computing power. AI requires stable, continuous power, while BTC mining can absorb surplus electricity generated due to imbalances in time and space. That is, BTC mining stabilizes the grid through "demand response": during periods of excess power (e.g., solar or wind peaks), computing power acts as load to absorb surplus energy; when power is scarce (during AI computation peaks), mining rigs can instantly shut down, freeing up electricity for higher-value AI clusters.
GENIUS Act: The Starting Point Where Stablecoins, RWA, and On-Chain Computing Power Converge
With the passage of the GENIUS Act in the U.S. in 2025, the dollar is preparing for a gradual digital transformation. Stablecoins are now incorporated into the federal regulatory framework, becoming the "on-chain extension" of the dollar system. This legislation not only injects trillions of dollars into a new on-chain liquidity pool for U.S. Treasuries but also provides a reference model for major jurisdictions—including the EU, UK, Singapore, and Hong Kong—in designing their own stablecoin regulations.
This regulatory clarity gives strong institutional momentum to the RWA (Real World Assets) market: with regulated stablecoins enhancing global liquidity and enabling efficient cross-border settlements, issuing and transferring RWAs becomes more seamless. Stablecoins have become the primary payment method for on-chain investments in real estate, bonds, art, and other RWAs, supporting fast global clearing.
Among these, AI computing power assets—due to high upfront costs, stable returns, and capital-intensive nature—are naturally suited for digitization on-chain and are gradually seen as standardized RWAs. Whether GPU cloud computing, AI inference resources, or utilization rates of edge computing nodes, parameters such as pricing, lease cycles, load rates, and energy efficiency ratios can all be quantified and mapped via smart contracts. This means future operations—rental, revenue sharing, transfer, and collateralization of computing power—will migrate fully onto on-chain financial infrastructure for trading, settlement, and refinancing. Moreover, on-chain data enables real-time insights into equipment operations and earnings, ensuring transparent and verifiable returns. Supply can be flexibly scheduled on-demand, reducing capital lock-up and resource idleness inherent in traditional heavy-asset models, thereby securing stable and transparent yields.
Even more exciting is the prospect that, just as Wall Street gave rise to oil exchanges after the discovery of oil two centuries ago, AI computing power—now tokenized as RWA—could become a standardized, tradable, collateralizable, and leveraged financial asset. This opens doors to innovative financial operations such as on-chain financing, leasing, and dynamic pricing. A new generation of "computing power capital markets" based on RWA will unlock highly efficient value circulation channels and vast application potential.
New Opportunities Under the "Dual Consensus"
In this new era where AI is fully integrated into our lives, computing power will stand as the consensus for high-efficiency productivity, while BTC—representing ultra-high liquidity accompanying such productivity—will redefine the consensus for value storage.
Companies that master either end of "productivity" or "assets" will emerge as the most valuable entities in the coming cycle. Cloud service providers sit precisely at the intersection of the "BTC value-consensus" and the "AI productivity-consensus." If computing power is the high-octane fuel driving the digital economy, then cloud services are the intelligent pipelines that carry and distribute this power.
Forecast of Global AI Cloud Service Market Size, Source: Frost & Sullivan
This includes several giants: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, xAI, and Meta—collectively known as "Hyperscalers." Their main business revolves around IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), serving general-purpose needs. While they possess vast pools of computing resources, their scheduling systems may prove inefficient when specialized compute demands arise. Hyperscalers dominate the upstream of AI computing services, controlling most of the available compute capacity and continuing aggressive infrastructure buildouts:
- Microsoft: Launching the "Stargate" initiative with a $100 billion investment, aiming to build a million-GPU cluster to support OpenAI’s evolving models with extreme-scale computing power.
- Amazon (AWS): Committed to investing $150 billion over the next 15 years, accelerating deployment of its proprietary Trainium 3 chip to decouple compute costs from external suppliers through hardware self-reliance.
- Google: Maintaining annual capital expenditures at a high level of $80–90 billion, leveraging the high energy efficiency of its custom TPU v6 chips to rapidly expand dedicated AI cloud regions worldwide.
- Meta: Zuckerberg stated clearly in an earnings call that Meta’s Capex will continue to grow, with 2025 guidance raised to $37–40 billion. Through liquid cooling upgrades and a reserve of 600,000 H100-equivalent compute units, Meta aims to build the world’s largest open-source AI computing pool.
- xAI: Leveraging the "Memphis speed," constructed Colossus—the world’s largest single supercomputing cluster—with a target of reaching one million GPUs, demonstrating extremely aggressive and efficient infrastructure delivery.
Other emerging cloud providers such as CoreWeave and Nebius are referred to as NeoClouds. Their offerings extend beyond IaaS to include PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service). Unlike the general-purpose platforms offered by giants, NeoClouds specialize in high-performance computing platforms tailored for AI training and inference. They offer more flexible compute leasing options and optimized scheduling solutions specifically designed for AI workloads, delivering faster response times and lower latency.
They stock top-tier GPUs (H100, B100, H200, Blackwell, etc.), build high-performance AIDCs (AI Data Centers), pre-install full systems with liquid cooling, RDMA networks, and scheduling software, and quickly deliver entire machines or even full园区 (parks) to clients under flexible daily rental agreements.
CoreWeave is undoubtedly the leading player among NeoClouds. One of the most notable tech stocks of 2025, CoreWeave focuses on cloud computing and GPU-accelerated infrastructure services tailored for AI training and inference. Of course, other companies eyeing this new compute-leasing model include strong competitors like Nebius, Nscale, and Crusoe.
Unlike CoreWeave and other NeoClouds competing in Europe and North America with massive capital-intensive compute clusters, GoodVision AI represents another possibility for globalized computing—leveraging intelligent scheduling and multi-user compute management to build rapidly deployable, low-latency, cost-effective AI infrastructure in emerging markets with relatively weak power and infrastructure. While giants build million-GPU clusters in places like Memphis for training ever-larger models, GoodVision AI solves the "last hundred miles" problem of AI deployment through modular inference nodes distributed across Asia and other emerging markets.
Notably, most top-tier AI computing providers share a distinct trait: their founding teams or core architects have deep roots in cryptocurrency mining. Transitioning from mining to AI computing is not a leap—it's a strategic reuse of core competencies. BTC mining and AI high-performance computing are highly analogous at the foundational level, both relying heavily on access to large-scale power, deployment of high-power-consumption facilities, and 7x24 extreme operational maintenance. The cheap power sourcing channels and hardware management expertise accumulated years ago have become premium assets in the AI era.
As demand for AI computing power grows exponentially, these firms have naturally pivoted their existing infrastructure—from "mining value storage assets (BTC)" to "delivering productive computing power (AI)." And as bidirectional switching technology matures, BTC can effectively balance out spatiotemporal mismatches in energy supply. Thus, entering the digital-intelligence era, the "fuel" driving productivity leaps shifts from oil to computing power, while the "underlying asset" anchoring its value evolves from gold to BTC.
By integrating blockchain technology to bring computing power on-chain as RWA assets, it becomes possible to create verifiable records of compute provenance, usage efficiency, and operational revenue. It also enables cross-regional, cross-temporal smart contract settlements, reducing counterparty risk and intermediary costs, and expanding applications in DeFi and cross-border compute leasing. For example, edge computing nodes can use smart scheduling to generate PoW-like proofs based on load rate and energy efficiency metrics. These parameters can be quantified via smart contracts, turning edge inference power into transferrable, mortgageable, standardized financial products—creating an "on-chain computing market." The convergence of computing power and RWA will further diversify on-chain asset types, unlocking entirely new liquidity frontiers for global capital markets.
Connecting Productivity and Value Storage: Toward the Monetary Future of Computing Power
This is the real-world validation of the "dual consensus" logic we previously articulated: BTC serves as the top-tier value anchor for energy, while AI represents the productive application of energy. From this perspective, the era of "computing power as money" is arriving faster and more disruptively than imagined. As humanity enters the digital-intelligence era, the "fuel" driving productivity leaps is shifting from oil to computing power, and the "foundational asset" underpinning value consensus is evolving from gold to BTC.
Right now, we are like the onlookers standing in the muddy fields of Pennsylvania in 1859, unable to imagine how that drill rod plunging into the earth would launch a new era of industrial civilization. Today, fiber-optic cables stretching into data centers around the globe are quietly forming the arteries of a new age. Those who bet early on computing power and BTC will become the new "oil barons" of this transformation, redefining the distribution of wealth and power in the new cycle.
Join TechFlow official community to stay tuned
Telegram:https://t.me/TechFlowDaily
X (Twitter):https://x.com/TechFlowPost
X (Twitter) EN:https://x.com/BlockFlow_News
Waterdrip Capital
