The way some companies rushed to joined mining and later fold up is same way people that rush AI will later stop because some people change means of income once they see bubbles and they don't last. If any mining company leaves, onew miners are going to join. If old ones leave, the blocks will only take an average of 14 days and if difficulty is adjusted, the rest will be doing the work. It will even open opportunity for more miners that want to mine Bitcoin.

It's even norma when miners leave during the bear market. Some unplug their miners during the bear market due to cost and price of Bitcoin and resume when the price is fair to cover the cost of production. The AI might not be a reason to leave a profitable business to start over another bubble you are not sure about.

Yes you are completely right, there is no ASIC to GPU conversion going on. Nobody is going to use a SHA256 ASIC for AI. I do not think that is what Core Scientific is doing (or able to do for that matter).

However I disagree that there is little "insurance" open to larger miners. Core Scientific for instance has signed 12year dollar based contracts with CoreWeave for their AI Data Center business. Core Scientific is basically acting as landlord and CoreWeave will be funding the equipment costs required directly (rather than Core Scientific) in return for usage inside of Core Scientific power area. In total these contracts are ~$6.7B USD of estimated total revenue for Core Scientific over the next 12years.

This may or may not be profitable in big picture of AI, but regardless Core Scientific is set to make on average hundreds of millions per year off these contracts. I think this mixed business model is mostly available to larger miners (MARA, Core Scientific, Hut8 tier) who have the skills, spare power capacity and good locations that AI tech giants want. Not sure a smaller miner is in a position to do such a thing.