Miners Bet Big on AI as Crypto Market Sees Strong Inflows

Crypto miners are undergoing a significant shift in their business model as they pivot towards high-performance computing and AI revenue. According to CoinShares, publicly listed miners could derive approximately 70% of their revenue from these sources by December 2026, up from around 30% earlier this year.

The driving force behind this migration is the growing demand for AI compute that has outstripped available power capacity in US data centers. Bitcoin miners happen to own large-scale power infrastructure, often in regions with favorable energy costs, already connected to the grid.

Cumulative announced AI and HPC contracts among publicly listed miners now exceed $70 billion. Core Scientific leads the pack with an expanded CoreWeave partnership valued at roughly $10.2 billion over 12 years. IREN has locked in a Microsoft GPU cloud contract worth approximately $9.7 billion over five years.

TeraWulf sits on more than $12.8 billion in contracted HPC revenue, while Hut 8 signed a 15-year lease with Fluidstack valued at around $7 billion, backed by Google. The economic math for pure-play Bitcoin mining has gotten tighter since the April 2024 halving, which cut block rewards in half.

CoinShares data shows the average cash cost to produce one Bitcoin among listed miners reached approximately $80,000 in Q4 2025. The company itself has signaled where it thinks the industry is headed by rebranding its WGMI ETF to the CoinShares Bitcoin Mining and Digital Power ETF.