Listed miners have announced more than $70B in AI and high-performance computing contracts. For advisors, that turns a one-dimensional bitcoin proxy into something closer to a digital power infrastructure allocation.
Cumulative announced AI and high-performance computing contracts across the listed bitcoin mining sector now exceed $70B.1 Against a group whose combined annual mining revenue is a fraction of that figure, this is not diversification at the margin. It is a re-founding of the business model around two demand engines: block rewards and contracted AI compute.
Why the squeeze created the pivot
Mining economics rest on three variables: the bitcoin price, the block reward, and the cost of power. The April 2024 halving cut the reward from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC, and newly issued bitcoin still accounts for close to 99% of the $17.0B miners earned in 2025, with transaction fees the small remainder.2 Competition, meanwhile, has never been fiercer. The network’s combined computing power now runs close to 1 zettahash per second, a one followed by 21 zeros.3 If every person on Earth performed one calculation per second, it would take humanity roughly 4,000 years to match what the network processes every second.
So miners run a business where revenue per unit of computation is programmatically cut every four years while the cost of competing climbs. The survivors have always been energy arbitrageurs, securing cheap electricity, often stranded, curtailed or renewable, and converting it into a globally tradeable asset. When a customer arrived willing to pay contracted, dollar-denominated rates for assets those operators already owned, the industry listened.
The constraint is energised land, not chips
The International Energy Agency projects global data centre electricity consumption roughly doubling from around 485 TWh in 2025 to about 950 TWh by 2030, with AI the most important driver. By 2030 data centres alone would consume slightly more than Japan does today, and in the US they are expected to account for almost half of all growth in electricity demand to 2030.4
What is scarce is not semiconductors. It is sites with secured grid connections, high-voltage infrastructure, cooling and power purchase agreements already in place, which take years to permit and build. Miners spent the last decade assembling exactly that portfolio, along with utility relationships and energy expertise that transfer directly to AI hosting.
The evidence is contracted, not narrative
Core Scientific has signed 12-year hosting agreements with CoreWeave worth $10.2B in total contract value.5 IREN secured a five-year, $9.7B AI cloud contract with Microsoft covering NVIDIA GB300 deployments at its Childress, Texas campus.6 TeraWulf has announced over $12B in long-term HPC hosting contracts, and its HPC leasing revenue overtook its bitcoin mining income for the first time in Q1 2026.7 Hut 8 signed a 15-year lease for its Beacon Point campus in Texas reported at $9.8B.8
The unifying asset is energy, and the optionality it creates is the durable part of the story. AI data centres pay for firm, always-on power; grids pay miners to curtail when stressed; bitcoin pays for whatever capacity is left. Operators controlling cheap, scalable power can arbitrage all three at once.
What changed in WGMI
The CoinShares Bitcoin Mining ETF (WGMI) has updated its strategy to match. The Fund now invests at least 80% of net assets in securities of Bitcoin Mining and Digital Power Companies, replacing its prior focus solely on bitcoin mining companies.9
The eligible universe has been widened accordingly, to operators of hyperscale data centres supporting AI, suppliers of data centre and AI components including semiconductors, companies in power generation and energy infrastructure essential to data centre operations, and companies in high-performance and quantum computing supporting AI workloads.9 The Fund retains flexibility to invest up to 20% of net assets in companies with broader bitcoin or digital infrastructure exposure.9
What advisors should keep in mind
Convergence does not remove risk, it changes its shape. Mining equities remain operationally leveraged to the bitcoin price and can fall more sharply than bitcoin itself in drawdowns. AI hosting adds customer concentration around a small number of counterparties, execution risk across multi-year construction timelines, and financing needs that have grown with ambition. AI infrastructure demand is structural but will not move in a straight line.
For clients who still hold mining stocks as a pure bitcoin proxy, that framing is out of date. The sector now offers exposure to bitcoin’s supply dynamics, to the buildout of AI computing capacity, and to the repricing of energy itself. Few industries sit at that intersection, and fewer arrived already holding the right assets.
For more news, information, and strategy, visit the CoinShares Crypto ETF Hub.
Sources
- Aggregate of announced sector contracts, company disclosures, as of July 2026
- Token Terminal, Bitcoin miner revenue, calendar year 2025, retrieved 03 Aug 2026
- Hashrate Index / CoinWarz network data, 2026
- International Energy Agency, Energy and AI, 2026 update
- Core Scientific and CoreWeave hosting agreements, company announcements
- IREN, SEC Form 8-K, November 2025
- TeraWulf, company reports, Q1 2026
- Hut 8, company announcement, Beacon Point campus lease
- CoinShares Bitcoin Mining ETF (WGMI), prospectus
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