I was under the impression that standard bitcoin mining leveraged GPUs for the heavy lifting. If that's not the case I'm happy to know what does
For instance, here is a shipping container that burns 1 megawatt of power in a pure and complete waste of energy and carbon emissions: https://shop.bitmain.com/product/detail?pid=0002021123118285...
though interestingly, the specialized processors alkso seem like an example of a second order effect of bitcoin: driving innovation towards more energy efficiency. (though the tradeoff here seems to be wasting materials versus wasting energy)