Ethan Ellenberg, founder and CEO of Moonshot, told miners at Mining Disrupt Dallas 2025 that what they own is power, and that the question is how to get the most out of it. His talk, recorded at the conference held November 12–14, 2025, set out what it takes to move a site built for Bitcoin mining toward AI.
It's a power play.
Ethan Ellenberg · 3:43
He focused on infrastructure: the electrical gear, the redundancy and the space a data center for AI needs, and why each one changes the cost of a megawatt.
From an apartment office to 500,000 square feet
Ellenberg, who said he has lived in Texas his whole life and went to the University of Texas, opened with Moonshot's story. The privately owned company is based in Denton, about 45 minutes north of the venue. He started it from an office in his rental apartment, moved to a 5,000-square-foot facility in 2022, to a 50,000-square-foot facility about a year before the talk, and in January to a 500,000-square-foot facility. He credited the mining industry for much of that growth.
Moonshot began in Bitcoin mining and has scaled into AI. It is a UL-listed panel shop that builds switchboards, panelboards and industrial control panels, along with ETL-listed PDUs and custom racking. Ellenberg said the company builds 200-megawatt facilities for public miners and named Hut 8, TeraWulf and Riot among its customers.
Among the projects he listed: the electrical infrastructure for TeraWulf's site tied to the Fluidstack and Google deal; support for Fermi America's Project Matador, which he described as an 11-gigawatt modular nuclear power plant for AI; work with Foxconn on a Houston facility building chassis for Nvidia servers; a 200-megawatt facility for Ionic Digital; and a three-building expansion for Riot that was under way at the time.
The cost per kilowatt
Ellenberg started with the servers. An S21 XP runs about $5,000 a unit, he said, against about $332,000 for an AI server, which draws about four times the kilowatts.
So your cost per kilowatt $1,400 versus $21,000 per kilowatt for AI, right?
Ethan Ellenberg · 4:15
On a 100-megawatt facility, he put the server count at about 28,000 for Bitcoin mining and 7,000 for AI. Server capex alone, by his figures, is about $140 million for Bitcoin and over two billion dollars for AI.
The gap widens with infrastructure. Miners build out their sites at up to about $350,000 per megawatt, he said. For AI the figure is $7 million to $10 million per megawatt for the infrastructure that supports the servers, or roughly $700 million to a billion dollars on a 100-megawatt project. His totals for 100 megawatts: close to $200 million for Bitcoin, and two to three billion dollars for AI.
Tier zero against 99.982% uptime
Redundancy, Ellenberg said, is what drives most of that difference. A Bitcoin mine is basically a tier zero data center. There is no redundancy: the site is on or off, and a miner can curtail. An AI facility has to stay up, with a target of 99.982% uptime, which means N+1 or 2N electrical and mechanical systems that can take over when power is lost.
That redundancy also makes the facility larger, he added, because all the extra electrical and mechanical equipment has to fit somewhere.
Site selection and fiber
For Bitcoin, site selection is basically cheap power, and a site can be remote. A tier three data center, Ellenberg said, needs to be somewhat close to a metropolitan area with access to resources. Connectivity is part of that.
Really with Bitcoin, you don't even need fiber, right?
Ethan Ellenberg · 6:47
Miners can run on Starlink. AI clients expect two separate fiber runs on a diverse path. Having available power because you mine Bitcoin, he said, does not mean you have the diverse fiber paths needed to win top-tier clients.
Two switchboards
Power density is extremely high in both cases, Ellenberg said, but the feed design is not. A Bitcoin site has a single feed. It may or may not need medium-voltage gear depending on its size; it needs padmount transformers, a switchboard of one or two sections, some panelboards and rack-mount PDUs, and no ATSs or UPSs. An AI site needs all of that, and may have two utility feeds, generator sets and UPS backup.
He showed the difference with two diagrams. In the Bitcoin example, power comes from the transformer into a 4,000-amp panel and out to the IT load. If that goes down, the miners shut off.
The AI example was a switchboard Moonshot built for TeraWulf: one lineup of nine sections, with 25 of them being built. It takes feed A and feed B from the utility, sends power out through breakers to the UPSs and back into the switchboard before it reaches the IT load, and uses tie breakers to keep the B feed separate.
The switchboard needs controls so the two utility feeds are never combined, which he said would blow it up, and Kirk key interlocks guard the bypass mode for the same reason.
Okay, for AI, you can't lose power, right?
Ethan Ellenberg · 8:42
That lineup is only the switchboard, he said; a second lineup just as long holds the UPSs.
It's almost a three to four times the amount of space to go from Bitcoin to AI on the electrical infrastructure.
Ethan Ellenberg · 9:53
Planning for space
Ellenberg closed with advice for miners thinking ahead: to future-proof a site, plan for the space, the electrical infrastructure and the redundancy an AI tenant would need.
This session was recorded at Mining Disrupt Dallas, November 12–14, 2025, when Bitcoin traded at $104,994. On October 19, 2026, it was $82,681. Mining Disrupt 2027 runs March 22–24 in Irving, Texas.