For the longest of time, the Bitcoin mining business has been relatively easy to understand.That is to get access to cheap electricity, buy mining machines, produce Bitcoin, and hope that the price of the cryptocurrency rises faster than your costs.But as it turns out, some Bitcoin miners may be sitting on something potentially more valuable than the very Bitcoin they produce. And that is power.The AI boom has created an enormous demand for data centres, but building them is not simply a case of buying more GPUs and putting up more buildings. You also need electricity, in fact lots of it. And in needing such amounts of power, that is increasingly becoming one of the biggest constraints facing the industry.In thinking about that limitation, I would say this creates a rather unusual opportunity for Bitcoin miners. They have spent years hunting for cheap power, securing large sites and connecting those facilities to the grid because that was what they needed to mine Bitcoin profitably.And now, AI companies are looking for many of those same things.Bitcoin miners already have something AI wantsThis is where the story starts to move beyond Bitcoin itself.Companies such as Cipher Digital, IREN, and Core Scientific have been pushing further into AI and high-performance computing by using their existing power and data centre infrastructure to support workloads outside of crypto.However, I don't think the individual company stories are necessarily the most interesting part. It is what they tell us about the assets sitting underneath the Bitcoin mining industry.Let's say if a miner already has hundreds of megawatts of power capacity, land and a grid connection, there may now be several ways to monetise that infrastructure.Bitcoin mining was perhaps the way to go about a decade to go. But now, there is another alternative. And that is AI computing.Depending on the economics, the latter could increasingly become the more attractive option.After all, Bitcoin mining itself is a particularly volatile business. Your revenue is tied to the Bitcoin price, mining difficulty, energy costs and the block reward.Meanwhile, AI hosting can offer something almost entirely different. Longer-term contracts and more predictable revenue don't remove the execution risks, but they potentially give miners another source of income that isn't directly tied to what Bitcoin happens to be doing that week.Power could become the more important metricThis now changes the conversation for how investors will be looking at Bitcoin miners. It is no longer just about costs and profitability, but how much power does the company actually control?That question becomes rather important in a time when power availability remains one of the bottlenecks holding back the AI data-centre boom.Computing hardware can be manufactured and new buildings can be constructed. But getting a massive data centre connected to the electricity grid? That can take years.And suddenly, a Bitcoin miner that already has access to that power starts looking rather different in terms of its potential.Of course, there will be questions such as is the power connected? And how quickly can it come online? And even if the site has the networking infrastructure needed for AI?Those little details matter but if a Bitcoin miner can address them, it definitely opens up a whole different game to play in today's market.Not every Bitcoin miner can become an AI companyThe concept and idea here is quite promising but let's not take the story too far.As mentioned, there will be several points that a Bitcoin miner needs to address before really even considering to make the switch.Not every Bitcoin mining facility is automatically an AI data centre. Some mining sites will make sense for conversion and others probably won't.So, I wouldn't treat every Bitcoin miner with a large electricity allocation as an AI infrastructure play.However, the broader shift is perhaps still worth watching.The industry may gradually split into companies that remain predominantly Bitcoin miners and others that start looking more like digital-infrastructure businesses, where mining Bitcoin is just one possible use for their electricity.And if that happens, investors have to stop asking only how much Bitcoin can these companies mine. The more important question could be what else they can do with the power they already have.Because if AI continues to push electricity demand much higher, some Bitcoin miners might find that the most valuable asset they own might not be the cryptocurrency or their mining machines. It may simply be access to power. This article was written by Justin Low at investinglive.com.