Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR) has kicked off construction on a 100-megawatt vertically integrated energy and computing facility in Alberta, Canada. The plant will generate its own electricity using natural gas to power both Bitcoin mining and, increasingly, AI compute tasks. The project is the latest example of mining firms taking energy supply into their own hands as grid capacity grows tighter and new workloads emerge.
On-site gas, on-site compute
The facility is designed as a single stack: natural gas wells feed a dedicated power plant, which in turn runs the computing hardware on location. That vertical setup is still unusual in mining, where most operations buy power from utilities or sign fixed-price contracts. By owning the generation, Bitdeer can bypass grid bottlenecks and lock in its own energy costs. The company said construction has started, though it didn't disclose a timeline for completion.
Why miners are building their own power plants
A growing number of miners are pairing data centers with dedicated generation. The logic is straightforward: Bitcoin mining is energy-intensive and price-sensitive, so predictable power costs matter. But there's a second force at work. AI workloads, especially training and inference, require enormous amounts of electricity. Miners that already run big compute fleets are now repurposing some of that capacity for AI customers — and having captive power makes that transition smoother. Bitdeer's Alberta facility is being built with that dual-use future in mind.
AI demand is reshaping the mining playbook
The push isn't just about survival in a tough crypto market. AI workload demand is rippling across electricity and digital infrastructure markets, forcing mining companies to rethink what they are. Firms that once measured success purely in hashrate now talk about "compute" and "energy assets." Bitdeer, which has been positioning itself as a broader computing infrastructure provider, fits that pattern. The Alberta project is a bet that the next wave of industrial computing will need more than just cheap power — it will need power that comes wired directly to the chips.
There's no word yet on what portion of the 100 MW will go to Bitcoin versus AI. But the facility is designed to flex, and that flexibility itself is the point. For miners, the old model of being a pure-play power buyer is fading. The ones that build their own generation — and build it for more than one workload — are the ones shaping the next chapter.
