Left hand BTC, right hand AI computing power: the gold and oil of the digital intelligence era

Written by: Jademont, Evan Lu, Waterdrip Capital

A Review of the Turbulent 2025 and a Look Ahead to the Long Cycle of AI

The New Industrial Revolution: Computing Power Becomes the Engine of Economic Operation

“In this world, only a few can inadvertently usher in an era that changes human history like Edwin Drake… His drill bit, penetrating deep into the earth, not only touched black liquid but also the arteries of modern industrial civilization.”

In 1859, amidst the mud in Pennsylvania, people gathered around Colonel Edwin Drake, mocking him. At that time, the world still relied on increasingly scarce whale oil for lighting, but Drake believed that underground “rock oil” could be mined at scale. This was considered a madman’s delusion. Until the first gush of black liquid erupted, no one could have imagined that oil would not only replace whale oil as a lighting energy but also become the cornerstone behind the struggle for dominance in human society over the next two centuries, reshaping global power and geopolitics for a hundred years. Humanity reached a turning point: old wealth depended on trade and shipping, while new wealth rose with the advent of railroads and energy (oil).

In 2025, we are in a game strikingly similar. However, this time, the surging force is the computing power flowing through silicon chips, and the “gold” is the code engraved on the blockchain; the new era’s “gold” and “oil” are reshaping our entire understanding of productivity and store-of-value assets. Looking back at 2025, the market experienced unexpectedly intense volatility. Trump’s aggressive tariff policies forced global supply chains to relocate, triggering a massive inflation rebound; gold hit a historic high above $4,500 amid geopolitical uncertainties; the crypto market, despite epic gains from the GENIUS Act at the start of the year, suffered a painful liquidation in early October due to leverage unwinding.

Beyond the macro fluctuations, a consensus in the AI computing industry is rapidly fermenting: Nvidia, the “Water Seller of AI,” reached a milestone market cap of $5 trillion in October. Additionally, giants Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have invested nearly $300 billion in AI infrastructure this year. For example, xAI’s upcoming deployment of a million-GPU cluster by year-end signals the importance of computing power. Elon Musk’s xAI built the world’s largest AI data center in Memphis in less than half a year and plans to expand to an astonishing scale of 1 million GPUs by year-end.

The Intelligent Era: The Main Theme of the Next Industrial Revolution

Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, once said: “Markets are like machines—you can understand how they work, but never predict their behavior precisely.” Even though macro environments are unpredictable and random, it is undeniable that AI remains the primary long-term growth channel for the US stock market. Over the next decade, AI technology will become the most critical gear in the market machinery, continuously influencing governments, enterprises, and individuals.

Despite ongoing debates about an “AI bubble,” many institutions warn that the AI investment boom shows signs of bubble-like tendencies: Morgan Stanley research pointed out that in 2025, investment growth in AI has led to soaring tech stock valuations without significant productivity gains, reminiscent of the internet boom of the 1990s.

However, an undeniable fact is that the productivity revolution driven by AI is gradually entering a phase of tangible monetization. From an investment perspective, AI is no longer just a narrative for tech giants; the efficiency dividends and extreme cost optimization it offers are the main drivers of profitability and productivity improvements for non-tech companies. But behind this lies a brutal trade-off: AI’s impact on employment, especially white-collar jobs, is unquestionable. Entry-level positions such as basic coding, accounting, auditing, and even junior management consulting and legal roles are likely to be among the first to be replaced.

As AI applications deepen, risks of unemployment in healthcare, education, retail, and other sectors are mounting. Recently, a cruel joke has circulated in the US investment community: software engineers in the future will be like today’s “civil engineers”; Elon Musk has emphasized in interviews that AI will replace all jobs. This also signals the arrival of a new industrial era—the “Digital Intelligence Era.”

Looking ahead to 2026, the demand for AI will continue to expand

Four Stages of Investment in the AI Industry

As the AI boom moves from concept to full industry adoption, and markets have fully priced in the MAG7 (the seven major US tech giants), where will the next wave of growth in AI themes come from? Goldman Sachs stock strategist Ryan Hammond proposed the “Four Stages of AI Investment” model, outlining the subsequent path: AI investment will sequentially go through four stages—chip manufacturing, infrastructure, revenue enablement, and productivity enhancement.

Source: Four Stages of AI Investment Model

Currently, the AI industry is at the intersection of “Infrastructure Expansion” transitioning into “Application Deployment,” moving from Stage 2 to Stage 3. The demand for AI infrastructure is exploding:

• By 2030, global data centers’ electricity demand will increase by 165%
• From 2023 to 2030, the US data center power demand will grow at a CAGR of 15%, increasing data centers’ share of total US electricity from 3% to 8%
• By 2028, global spending on data centers and hardware will reach $3 trillion

Source: Goldman Sachs US Data Center Power Demand Forecast

Meanwhile, the generative AI application market is also booming, projected to grow to $1.3 trillion by 2032. In the short term, infrastructure construction for training will drive a 42% CAGR; in the medium to long term, growth will shift toward inference devices for large language models (LLMs), digital advertising, specialized software, and services.

Source: Bloomberg Generative AI Growth Forecast

This trend will be validated by 2026. Goldman Sachs’ latest macro outlook states that 2026 will be the “Year of Realized Returns” for AI investments, with AI significantly reducing costs for 80% of S&P 500 non-tech companies, marking a shift from potential to actual performance on corporate balance sheets.

Therefore, in the next 2-3 years, market focus will no longer be limited to tech giants but will expand downward into AI infrastructure (power, hardware, data centers) and upward into generalized industry companies successfully transforming AI into profit growth.

AI Computing Power as the “New Oil,” BTC as the “New Gold”

If AI computing power is the “new oil” of the Digital Intelligence Era, driving exponential productivity leaps, then BTC (Bitcoin) will be the “new gold,” serving as the ultimate underlying asset for value anchoring and credit settlement.

AI, as an independent economic entity, does not need banks; it only needs energy. BTC is a pure “digital energy store.” In the future, AI will be the “fuel” of the economy, while BTC will be the “anchor” behind economic value. BTC issuance is entirely based on proof-of-work (PoW) driven by electricity consumption, aligning perfectly with AI’s essence—converting electricity into intelligence.

Furthermore, AI computing power, as a consumptive productive asset, has core costs rooted in electricity, and its value output depends on algorithm efficiency; BTC, as a decentralized store of value, embodies energy monetization and naturally functions as a “reservoir” balancing global computing power disparities. AI requires continuous, stable electricity, while BTC mining can absorb excess power from the grid—using demand response (DR): surplus energy (e.g., during wind or solar peaks) can be used for mining, and during peak AI computation, mining can shut down instantly to release power for higher-value AI clusters.

Genius Act: The Convergence of Stablecoins + RWA + On-Chain Computing Power

With the US passing the GENIUS Act in 2025, the US dollar is gradually digitizing, with stablecoins incorporated into federal regulation and becoming an “on-chain extension” of the dollar system. This law injects trillions of dollars of new on-chain liquidity into US debt markets and provides a model for stablecoin regulation in key jurisdictions like the EU, UK, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

This regulatory framework first boosts the RWA (Real World Assets) market: under the enhanced liquidity and efficient cross-border settlement enabled by regulated stablecoins, issuance and circulation of RWAs—such as real estate, bonds, and art—become more convenient. Stablecoins have become the main payment method for on-chain investments in RWAs, supporting fast global cross-border clearing.

Among these, AI computing assets, with high input costs, steady yields, and heavy asset attributes, are naturally suited as standardized RWAs: GPU cloud computing, AI inference resources, and edge computing node capacities can all be quantified and mapped via on-chain smart contracts. This means future business models like computing power leasing, yield splitting, transfer, and collateralization will migrate to on-chain financial infrastructure for trading, settlement, and refinancing. Additionally, on-chain data can provide real-time insights into device operation and revenue, ensuring transparent and verifiable returns. Computing supply can be flexibly scheduled on demand, reducing capital lock-up and resource idling typical of traditional heavy asset models, ensuring stable and transparent returns.

More excitingly, like the oil exchanges that emerged after the discovery of oil on Wall Street two centuries ago, AI computing power, via RWA, could become a standardized financial asset for trading, collateral, and leverage, enabling innovations like on-chain financing, trading, leasing, and dynamic pricing. The next-generation “Computing Power Capital Market” based on RWA will have more efficient value transfer channels and limitless application potential.

New Opportunities Under “Dual Consensus”

In this new era where AI is fully integrated into our lives, computing power will be regarded as a consensus of high-efficiency productivity, and with this extreme liquidity—BTC will be redefined as the “store of value” consensus.

Thus, companies that can master either “productivity” or “assets” will become the most valuable entities in future cycles. Cloud service providers are at the intersection of “BTC store of value” and “AI productivity” consensus. If computing power is the high-energy fuel driving the rapid operation of the digital economy, then cloud services are the intelligent pipelines carrying and distributing this power.

Global AI Cloud Service Market Size Forecast, Source: Frost & Sullivan

Major players include Microsoft, Amazon, Google, XAI, and Meta. They are known as “Hyperscalers”—large-scale cloud providers mainly offering IAAS (Infrastructure as a Service) for general needs. Despite their large resource pools, they may face inefficiencies in compute resource scheduling. Hyperscalers control most of the market’s computing resources and continue expanding infrastructure:

• Microsoft: Launches the $100 billion “Stargate” plan to build a million-GPU cluster supporting OpenAI’s model evolution.
• AWS: Commits $150 billion over 15 years, deploying self-developed Trainium chips to decouple compute costs from external supply.
• Google: Maintains annual capital expenditure of $80-90 billion, rapidly expanding AI-specific cloud regions with its TPU v6.
• Meta: CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced increased Capex, upgraded liquid cooling tech, and reserves of 600,000 H100-equivalent GPUs to build the world’s largest open-source AI compute pool.
• xAI: Completed the world’s largest supercomputing cluster, Colossus, in Memphis, aiming for 1 million GPUs, demonstrating aggressive and efficient infrastructure delivery.

Other emerging cloud providers like CoreWeave, Nebius, and Nscale (collectively NeoCloud) focus on IAAS + PAAS, offering high-performance computing platforms tailored for AI training and inference, with flexible leasing, low latency, and rapid deployment.

Leading NeoCloud players include CoreWeave, which is one of the most promising tech stocks in 2025, specializing in AI training and inference cloud infrastructure. Competitors like Nebius, Nscale, and Crusoe are also strong contenders.

Unlike the heavy asset cluster battles of NeoCloud giants in Europe and America, GoodVision AI exemplifies a different path—globalized compute power via intelligent scheduling and multi-user management, deploying modular inference nodes in emerging markets with weaker infrastructure, enabling rapid deployment, low latency, and cost-effective AI infrastructure, promoting compute power democratization. Meanwhile, giants build massive GPU clusters in Memphis for large models, while GoodVision AI uses distributed inference nodes in Asia to solve the “last mile” latency issues for AI applications.

Most top AI compute service providers share a clear trait: their founding teams or core architectures are rooted in crypto mining. Transitioning from mining to AI compute is not a cross-industry shift but a strategic reuse of core capabilities. BTC mining and high-performance AI computing are highly homologous at the fundamental level—both rely heavily on large-scale electricity, high-power centers, and 24/7 operations. The cheap electricity channels and hardware management experience accumulated early on have become the most valuable premium assets in the AI wave.

As AI compute demand grows exponentially, these infrastructures are naturally shifting from “value-harvesting assets (BTC)” to “output productivity compute (AI).” With mature “dual switching” technology, BTC can effectively balance energy and spatial disparities. In the Digital Intelligence Era, the “fuel” driving productivity will shift from oil to compute power, and the “underlying asset” anchoring its value will evolve from gold to BTC.

By integrating blockchain technology to on-chain compute power as RWA assets, verifiable records of compute source, efficiency, and operational revenue can be established, along with cross-regional, cross-temporal smart contract settlement mechanisms—reducing credit risk and intermediary costs, expanding applications in DeFi and cross-border compute leasing. For example, edge nodes’ load and efficiency parameters can be proven via PoW and smart contracts, making edge inference compute tradable, collateralized, and a standardized financial product, creating an “on-chain compute market.” The combination of compute and RWA will further diversify on-chain assets, opening new liquidity channels for global capital markets.

Connecting Productivity and Store of Value: Toward the Future of Compute Power Monetization

This is the practical validation of our earlier “Dual Consensus” logic: BTC is the top-level energy value anchor, and AI is the productivity application of energy. From this perspective, the era of “compute power as currency” will arrive faster and more disruptively than imagined. As humanity enters the Digital Intelligence Era, the “fuel” driving productivity will shift from oil to compute power, and the “underlying asset” supporting its value consensus will evolve from gold to BTC.

At this moment, we are like the spectators in Pennsylvania in 1859, unable to imagine how that drill deep underground would usher in a new era of industrial civilization. Today, cables extending to data centers worldwide are quietly building the arteries of this new era. Those early adopters betting on compute power and BTC will play the role of new “oil tycoons,” redefining the distribution of wealth and power in this new cycle.

References:

John S. Gorden: “The Great Game: The Rise of Wall Street’s Financial Empire”

Daniel Yergin: “The Oil Game”

Goldman Sachs: AI infrastructure stocks are poised to be the next phase of investment

Goldman Sachs: AI, data centers, and the coming US power demand surge

Bloomberg: Generative AI to Become a $1.3 Trillion Market by 2032, Research Finds

KPMG: Bitcoin’s role in the ESG imperative

Square: Bitcoin is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future

Arthur Hayes: Bitcoin will be the currency of artificial intelligence

36Kr: CoreWeave: In the Era of Computing Power, Holding the “Golden Shovel”