The energy - not the ASICs. At most energy of the large miners today, already unprofitable for bitcoin. That’s why they’re repurposing their sites to HPC.

So they let the miners sit unused while mining is unprofitable? If so, that's annoyingly inefficient... Surely there's something a miner can do other than mine, during these periods..

Those miners represent a capital investment. They could recoup some of that investment by selling the rigs. I'd argue that ai compute & bitcoin mining incentives will constantly compete for energy usage & capital allocation. What might not be sustainable today may be highly profitable in 3 months.

ASICs can only do a very specific task. ASIC (Application-specific Integrated Circuit) They are very high performance in that one specific thing. But, as Jeff said, AI is competing for the energy and infrastructure.