Crypto Miners Riding the AI Wave Are Leaving Bitcoin Behind (finance.yahoo.com)

Large-scale Bitcoin miners are increasingly repositioning themselves as AI and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure providers, and markets are rewarding the shift: a fund tracking listed miners is up over 150% year-to-date while firms like Cipher and IREN have rallied roughly 300% and 500% respectively. Concrete moves include Cipher’s 10‑year, ~$3 billion colocation deal with Fluidstack (which included $1.4 billion in guaranteed lease obligations in exchange for warrants representing a 5.4% stake), IREN’s $1 billion convertible note offering, TeraWulf’s $3.2 billion secured notes to expand a data center, and Bitdeer’s plan to convert a 570‑MW Ohio site to AI/HPC (projecting up to $2 billion annualized revenue in a best case). Investors are increasingly valuing miners for their compute, power and real‑estate assets rather than block rewards. The pivot is driven by economics: last year’s Bitcoin halving (6.25 → 3.125 BTC), rising network difficulty, slowing transactions and record‑low hashprice have squeezed mining unit economics, while AI/HPC colocation yields far higher revenue per megawatt and EBITDA margins. Technically, repurposing power and floor space for GPUs and HPC slows hashrate expansion, shifting the industry’s focus from raw hash additions to energy efficiency and utilization. For the AI/ML community this means a growing supply of colocated compute capacity and more competition for power-constrained sites, while for Bitcoin it implies potentially slower growth in network hashing but a more diversified, infrastructure‑driven miner ecosystem.