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Research Notes Chi Song

Which bitcoin miners still have unconverted power assets for AI?

Why bitcoin miners became AI infrastructure candidates, which companies have converted power into contracted data center capacity, and which still have catalysts ahead

A business story about how being at the frontier puts a company in the right place to get lucky:

Bitcoin miners did not set out to become AI landlords... but now they are. And now their enterprise values are going vertical, with stocks like Hut 8 up 115%+ YTD, up 29% over the past week on a $7B lease with Google.

Bitcoin miners spent the last decade chasing cheap electricity. That meant buying or leasing land near substations, securing interconnection rights, building high-density compute facilities, and learning how to operate huge power loads in places most traditional data center developers ignored.

For years, the market treated that as a commodity Bitcoin business. Revenues and valuations fluctuated with the price of bitcoin.

Then power and data center sites became the bottleneck to AI.

Suddenly, bitcoin miners owned exactly what hyperscalers and AI clouds needed: energized sites, grid access, power expertise, and development pipelines that could be converted into AI data center capacity.

This much has been obvious to the market. Stocks like Hut 8, Core Scientific ($CORZ), IREN ($IREN) are already multi-baggers over the past years, even as revenues from bitcoin mining stagnated.

The investable question now is which miners have already converted that power into contracted AI infrastructure, and which still might have catalysts ahead.

The first-wave winners

  • IREN is leasing to Microsoft.
  • Hut 8 now has 597 MW of contracted AI capacity and ~$16.8B of base-term lease value.
  • Core Scientific and Applied Digital ($APLD) signed with CoreWeave ($CRWV).
  • Cipher Mining ($CIFR), TeraWulf ($WULF), and Riot (\$RIOT) have also moved from “miner with power” toward “AI infrastructure platform,” with Riot’s first data center lease signed with AMD (\$AMD).

Price discovery has already happened for this group. All multi-baggers over the past years.

The credible unconverted assets

This is where more risk and more opportunity may exist

  • CleanSpark ($CLSK) has a real mining business, a large contracted power portfolio, and an explicit AI/HPC path, but hasn't yet signed a hyperscale lease.
  • Bitdeer ($BTDR) has meaningful global power assets and AI conversion plans, but is still waiting on tenant proof.
  • MARA ($MARA) has the Starwood Digital Ventures JV, which gives it a credible development partner, but still has yet to disclose tenants, economics, and timelines.

There are real questions about site control, usable power, financing, and a credible route to a customer.

The long tail

  • Digi Power X ($DGXX) is a small-cap example: A former miner with power assets just signed Cerebras for a 40 MW Alabama AI campus for ~$1.1B over 10 years.
  • $SLNH, $GREE are more speculative special sits.

But if demand for AI continues to grow, even marginal solutions become valuable.

Three years ago, nobody could've seen this coming. But by doing hard things, these companies inadvertently made themselves very valuable.