Power cost is the largest variable in Bitcoin mining economics. It's not the price of the machine. It's not the pool fee. It's not network difficulty. It's the electricity bill — and it compounds every hour, every day, every year. Get power wrong and no amount of hashrate optimization rescues your margins.

The national power rate problem

The average U.S. residential electricity rate is approximately 16¢/kWh. In high-cost states, that number climbs dramatically: Connecticut averages 27¢, California 22¢, New York 20¢. Commercial rates are often lower, but still significantly above what institutional-grade mining facilities pay.

Most home miners and small operations run on 12–18¢ power. Here's what that means for an Antminer S21 Pro — Bitmain's current flagship — running at 3,510 watts:

That's $547 per month, per miner, in savings for a Connecticut miner hosting with us instead of mining at home. Run 20 miners and that's $10,940 per month — $131,280 per year — that stays in your pocket rather than going to your utility company.

Why TVA power is structurally different

Most favorable power arrangements are temporary. Promotional rates. Special economic development programs with clawback provisions. Agreements that expire or reset when the political environment shifts. Operators who build around these arrangements find themselves repriced out of profitability within 18–36 months.

TVA — the Tennessee Valley Authority — is a federal agency created by Congress in 1933. It's not a commercial utility seeking to maximize shareholder return. Its mandate is affordable, reliable power for the Tennessee Valley region. The rate structure Pursuit Link operates under has a 20-year horizon, not a 2-year promotional window.

EPB, Chattanooga's municipal electric utility, has built what's been rated the most advanced smart grid in the United States — 1,100+ self-healing switches that restore power in seconds, not hours. That reliability compounds over time into measurable uptime advantages for hosted miners.

The math across a fleet

At 50 miners (a modest mid-size operation), the annual power savings at Pursuit Link vs. the U.S. commercial average of 12¢/kWh is approximately $100,000. That savings can fund more than 2,000 additional PL Shares at $50 each — effectively growing your mining capacity from the efficiency gain alone.

Power isn't just an operating cost. From 5.5¢/kWh, it's a structural competitive advantage. Every miner you run here is running against a lower cost basis than 95% of your competition.

Most people who want exposure to Bitcoin mining face the same three obstacles: the hardware is expensive (a current-gen ASIC costs $4,000–$6,000), the hosting requires a minimum fleet commitment, and the technical setup is a barrier for anyone who isn't already a miner. PL Shares solves all three.

The concept: 1% of a miner, starting at $50

PL Shares lets you purchase a percentage of a specific ASIC miner running at our facility in Chattanooga. Each miner is divided into 100 shares, representing 100 percent of that machine's hashrate. You can purchase as little as one share — 1% of a miner — starting at $50.

This is not a fund. It's not a token. It's not a derivative. You own a compute service contract tied to a specific machine with a real serial number that you can verify on your Foreman dashboard.

How BTC payouts work

Your share earns Bitcoin proportionally to the percentage of hashrate you own. The calculation is straightforward:

Your hashrate earns gross BTC based on its share of the network's total mining output. From that gross amount, two costs are deducted: the hosting cost (power starting at 5.5¢/kWh, calculated on your proportional share of the miner's wattage) and a 10% management fee. The remaining BTC is sent directly to your Bitcoin wallet every day.

If you own 5 shares (5%) of an Antminer S21 Pro (234 TH/s, 3,510W), you control 11.7 TH/s of hashrate. At current network conditions and BTC price, that generates approximately 0.00014 BTC per day in gross mining output, before hosting and management fee deductions.

How this is different from cloud mining

Cloud mining operations ask you to purchase "hashrate" with no visibility into the underlying hardware, no ability to verify the equipment exists, and no recourse if the operation becomes unprofitable and shuts down — a common outcome in the industry's history.

PL Shares is different in three specific ways:

Real serial numbers. Every share is tied to a specific ASIC miner with a manufacturer serial number. You can look it up. It's not pooled into anonymous hardware.

Tour the facility. Your miner runs at our secure facility in Chattanooga, TN. Schedule a facility tour by appointment — we'll provide location details and show you the specific rack your machine is in.

Live Foreman dashboard. Real-time hashrate, temperature, fan speed, uptime, and earnings are visible on your dashboard at all times — the same monitoring platform institutional miners use.

The risk disclosure you deserve upfront

In 2024, the dominant narrative in Bitcoin mining was halving math — how operators would survive the revenue compression when block rewards dropped from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC. By mid-2026, that narrative has been completely supplanted. Public miners aren't talking about survival. They're talking about AI.

$70B+ in AI/HPC contracts signed by public miners in 2026

The numbers are hard to overstate. Core Scientific signed a $10.2 billion agreement with CoreWeave to convert a significant portion of its mining infrastructure to AI colocation. Hut 8 announced a $7 billion Google-backed AI infrastructure lease. TeraWulf has committed 72 megawatts to AI/HPC hosting at its nuclear-powered Lake Mariner facility. Cipher Mining, Marathon Digital, and Bitfarms are all in various stages of similar pivots.

In February 2026, Morgan Stanley initiated coverage of Bitcoin miners with an explicit framing: not as cryptocurrency companies, but as energy infrastructure for the AI economy. The thesis is straightforward. Miners have done the hard work — they've found power, built grid interconnections, erected facilities, and established operational track records with utilities. Those assets are exactly what the AI data center build-out needs, and hyperscalers are paying premium prices to access them quickly.

Why the pivot makes economic sense

Bitcoin mining generates approximately $80–150 per kilowatt per month in revenue, depending on BTC price and network difficulty. AI/HPC colocation generates $150–300 per kilowatt per month under multi-year contracts — with far less volatility, since it's tied to long-term agreements rather than daily BTC price movements.

For operators with power-ready, fiber-connected facilities, the economics of shifting capacity toward AI workloads are compelling. Mining remains a valuable use of power during periods of lower AI demand — it fills otherwise idle capacity with revenue-generating work. The optimal model is hybrid: AI/HPC as the anchor, mining as dynamic fill load.

What this means for Pursuit Link

Pursuit Link is a smaller operator, but we're executing the same strategic playbook — intentionally and ahead of scale. Our TVA power infrastructure and EPB dark fiber connectivity are the exact profile that hyperscalers, GPU cloud providers, and AI training companies are seeking. Our NVIDIA infrastructure positions us to serve inference workloads locally, while our existing ASIC hosting operation provides cash-flowing infrastructure from day one.

The mining-to-AI transition isn't a story about miners becoming something else. It's a story about power-rich, fiber-connected operators realizing their underlying asset — reliable, affordable compute capacity — is the scarcest resource in the AI economy. We've been building that asset in Chattanooga since inception.

The same TVA rate agreement that makes our Bitcoin hosting margins compelling makes our AI infrastructure costs competitive with any primary data center market. The EPB dark fiber that connects us at up to 400 Gbps gives us the latency profile that AI inference and model serving require. The self-healing smart grid that EPB built — 1,100+ switches, seconds to restoration — gives us the uptime reliability that institutional AI tenants demand.

The opportunity for investors and anchor tenants

The data center sector is entering a generational capital deployment cycle. An estimated $3 trillion in infrastructure investment will be required by 2030 to meet AI compute demand. Primary markets — Northern Virginia, Phoenix, Chicago, Dallas — face 4+ year grid connection wait times and construction costs exceeding $11M per megawatt. Operators who can deliver power-ready capacity now, in markets with structural cost advantages, are commanding premium valuations and long-term lease commitments.

Pursuit Link is positioned to be that operator in the Tennessee Valley region. If you're evaluating AI infrastructure opportunities or looking for anchor compute capacity in a cost-advantaged market, we'd like to have that conversation.