Original｜Odaily Planet Daily（@OdailyChina）
Author｜Wenser（@wenser 2010）
Over the past decade, Bitcoin mining companies have been the most stable foundation of PoW networks and the cost anchor of BTC's "0-level market." However, this group of industry cornerstones is now collectively turning, either actively or passively leaning towards AI.
On the surface, the direct incentives for mining companies to transform are the continued rise in mining difficulty and the shrinking profit margins due to a sluggish market; but the deeper driving force is the extreme pursuit by capital markets of the AI narrative — and mining companies just happen to possess the most easily convertible real assets: electricity, land, cooling systems, data centers, and ready-made data infrastructure, which can be exchanged for AI computing power orders worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Amid the clamor of multi-model competition, mining companies standing at the intersection of energy, electricity, computational power, and crypto assets are undergoing an unprecedented yet almost unavoidable industry migration.
Some are taking steady steps and remaining observant, while others are being forced to turn around and gamble everything, but one thing is certain: a strong wind has risen; this is a structural migration from the crypto market towards the AI world.
A Hard Battle That Must Be Fought, and an Irresistible Cake
Entering 2026, the real pressure on mining companies has never only stemmed from price fluctuations, but from structural squeezes: constantly rising difficulty, continuously declining unit income, and rising operational costs.
In the Cold Winter: Selling Coins to Survive and Bankruptcy Liquidation
On February 20, Bitcoin mining difficulty rose by 15% to 144.4T, marking the largest increase since 2021. During the same period, the network hashrate rebounded from 826EH/s to 1ZH/s, yet the hashprice fell to a multi-year low, at around $23.9/PH/s. Under the profit compression brought on by the 2024 halving, mining companies were forced into cash flow defense mode.
The most symbolic event came from Bitdeer. On February 20, it disclosed that its own BTC holdings had dropped to zero, with production and sales fully intertwined that week. Although founder Wu Jihan later explained that "current zero does not mean future zero," the market still viewed it as a reflection of the pressures facing mining companies.
The predicament is not unique. In early February, NFN8 Group applied for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Texas, planning to sell all its assets. Documents reveal that core mining sites suffered from fires, burdens stemming from a leaseback sales model, and the cliff-like drop in hashprice after the halving, which directly crushed cash flow. Despite operating multiple sites, NFN8's estimation of its 5,000 mining machines is under $50,000, with liabilities reaching the million-dollar range.
As the environment continued to worsen, mining companies reacted remarkably uniformly — heading towards AI.
Second Spring: Surprising Profits Behind AI/HPC Large Orders
For AI giants, computing power data centers are always scarce: traditional construction cycles take 3–5 years, with high costs for land, electricity, and cooling. Mining companies already possess electricity contracts, infrastructure, and operational experience, making them the most realistic partners during the AI expansion cycle.
Since last year, mining companies have seen a concentrated explosion of orders. As of the time of writing, public data shows that six mining companies, including IREN, CIFR, and HUT, have accumulated approximately $38.5 billion in AI/HPC orders, with TeraWulf and Fluidstack signing contracts worth $12.8 billion and IREN signing a five-year contract worth $9.7 billion with Microsoft, which has also become an important support for their rising stock prices. From financial reports, many mining companies have increased their AI/HPC revenue share from below 15% to 40%-60%.
If mining is a cyclical business, then AI is like a long-term cash flow pipeline.
Financial Report Consensus: AI as the Keyword
The Q1 financial report season of 2026 almost provides a uniform signal that mining companies are undergoing systematic transformation.
“HPC Contract Giant” WULF: Holding Over $12.8 Billion in Contracts
The mining company TeraWulf achieved total revenue of $168.5 million in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 20.3%, with $16.9 million coming from its newly launched high-performance computing (HPC) leasing business.
Currently, TeraWulf holds HPC contracts worth over $12.8 billion, with a contracted capacity of 522MW, and has secured $6.5 billion in financing support for data center expansion.
“AI Mining Small Giant” IREN: Holding a $9.7 Billion Contract with Microsoft
Thanks to previous huge orders and rapid transformation, IREN has subtly become a new generation “AI mining small giant.”
According to the mining company IrisEnergy (IREN) financial report, as of January 31, 2026, it held cash and cash equivalents of $2.8 billion, having raised over $9.2 billion this fiscal year through customer prepayments, convertible bonds, GPU leasing, and GPU financing. Future plans include adding 140,000 GPUs, with an expected annual recurring revenue of $3.4 billion by the end of 2026.
“Trump's House” HUT: Holding $7 Billion in Orders
Mining company Hut8 has generated $9.6 million in revenue through hosting services in the 2025 fiscal year, holding approximately $1.4 billion in cash and Bitcoin reserves.
In addition, Hut8's spun-off subsidiary AmericanBitcoin (ABTC) achieved a total revenue of $185.2 million in 2025, deployed approximately 25EH/s of computational power, and possesses about 78,000 ASIC miners, with BTC reserves exceeding 6,000 units.
This company is also a significant cryptocurrency miner supported by the Trump family, thus attracting high market attention.
“Brand Transformation Completed” CIFR: Holding $5.5 Billion in Orders
Mining company CipherDigital disclosed in its 2025 fiscal performance report that it officially changed its name from “CipherMining” to “CipherDigital” to complete its brand transformation.
Last November, CIFR reached a leasing agreement worth up to $5.5 billion with Amazon Web Services; additionally, it also obtained consent for a 5.4% equity exchange to guarantee the $1.4 billion contract between Fluidstack and Google.
“Selling Coins to Buy Land to Build Data Centers” RIOT: Achieved Lease Cooperation with AMD
Mining company RiotPlatforms announced its full-year performance for 2025, achieving revenue of $647.4 million, a significant increase from $376.7 million in 2024; its Bitcoin holdings exceed 18,000 units.
In January, RIOT sold 1,080 Bitcoins and used the funds (around $96 million) to purchase Rockdale land for data center project development. Moreover, the company also signed a data center leasing and service agreement with AMD, which will deploy a critical IT load capacity of 25 megawatts in the Rockdale park. Radical investment firm StarboardValue stated that Riot's potential valuation in the shift towards AI and HPC could reach $21 billion.
“BTC Strong Faction” MARA: Partnering with Capital Institutions to Lay Out AI Data Centers
MARA financial report data showed that due to a roughly 14% drop in the average Bitcoin mining price, MARA's Q4 revenue for 2025 was $202.3 million, a year-on-year decrease of around 6%. At the end of February, MARA announced a partnership with investment firm Starwood Capital Group to build large data centers aimed at AI and cloud computing customers on existing mining site foundations in the U.S. Following the announcement, its stock price surged by about 17% in after-hours trading.
It is worth mentioning that, unlike other mining companies firmly transitioning towards AI, MARA's management emphasized that although short-term price trends are uncertain, their long-term confidence in Bitcoin as an asset class remains unchanged, Bitcoin will still be the core of their long-term strategy.
“Data Center Revenue Surge” CORZ: Holding CoreWeave's Orders Over $10 Billion
CoreScientific (CORZ) released its Q4 2025 financial report, indicating total Q4 revenue of $79.8 million, down from $94.9 million in the same period last year. Among them, the revenue from Bitcoin mining business dropped to $42.2 million; revenue from data center hosting services surged to $31.3 million, higher than $8.5 million in 2024. Q4 gross profit increased to $20.8 million, compared to $4.8 million during the same period in 2024.
CoreScientific CEO Adam Sullivan remarked that more than half of the company's existing construction projects have been completed, and it is expanding its hosting platform to a 1.5 gigawatt lease capacity pipeline. Last October, AI company CoreWeave planned to acquire CoreScientific at a valuation of about $9 billion, but ultimately withdrew due to lack of shareholder approval; in January this year, CoreScientific sold 1,900 BTC (approximately $175 million) for business transformation.
The company estimates that AI business will drive a compound annual growth of 60.9% in revenue from 2026 to 2028, reaching $1.5 billion by 2028.
Other Mining Company Representatives: Bitfarms Rebrands, BitDigital Switches to ETH Camp
In February, Bitfarms (BITF) announced its move of headquarters registration from Canada to the U.S. and plans to rebrand as Keel Infrastructure (pending shareholder, exchange, and court approval) to accelerate its transformation towards infrastructure. Prior to this, the company had already converted $300 million in debt financing for project financing for data center construction in Pennsylvania, and in January this year, it sold the Paso Pe mining site for $30 million, officially exiting the Latin American market.
On the other hand, BitDigital's transition is more thorough. As early as last July, when the DAT (Odaily note: Digital Assets Treasury) craze emerged, it was the first to announce a shift from BTC to ETH for treasury public listings; in January this year, it further clarified that it would completely stop Bitcoin mining and invest more in Ethereum infrastructure, staking, and HPC/AI strategies, marking this five-year deep mining company's official completion of its camp switch. Currently, its AI subsidiary WhiteFiber has completed its IPO, and BitDigital holds approximately 27 million shares, valued at over $457 million at the current market price.
In addition to the two mentioned above, Galaxy, Bitdeer, Cleanspark, and Cango are still in the AI transition phase, with revenue contributions yet to be increased. Among them, Cango completed $10.5 million in equity financing and received an additional $65 million investment commitment in February this year, potentially accelerating the layout of AI/HPC data center business.
The following is a brief comparison based on public information for reference.
Capital Attitude: Choosing Winners, Not Narratives
The market is not entirely accepting of the "AI transformation," but is rapidly differentiating.
In early February, JPMorgan pointed out in a report that Bitcoin mining companies performed robustly at the beginning of the year, mainly driven by a temporary relief in network competition and a warming AI narrative. At that time, the total market value of 14 publicly listed mining companies and data center operators tracked by it rose to approximately $60 billion at the end of January, a 23% increase from the previous quarter, far exceeding the roughly 1% increase of the S&P 500 during the same period.
However, soon, with a new round of intensive AI model releases and the impact of OpenClaw on the valuation system of software stocks, market sentiment shifted rapidly, and capital began to worry about the structural disruption brought by AI, leading to a pullback in the stock prices of mining companies related to AI infrastructure, with CIFR, IREN, and Hut8 falling more than 10% in one day.
On February 10, Morgan Stanley released a report giving CIFR and WULF an overweight rating while Downgrading MARA to a sell.
By the end of February, with order fulfillment and stock price recovery, market trends reversed again. Some analysts believe that in the context of hedge funds having a high short position, combined with mining companies locking in long-term low-cost electricity contracts, their strategic value extends beyond traditional mining and is closer to that of AI infrastructure suppliers.
As order fulfillment and stock prices recover, market logic gradually becomes clear: capital only bets on structural winners.
Therefore, the future of mining companies is broadly contingent upon three factors:
Execution Ability: Whether they can rapidly complete the transition in computational power forms;
Resource Endowments: Whether electricity and land have scale advantages;
Narrative Ability: Whether they can embed themselves into the upstream AI supply chain.
In fact, the decisions regarding a company’s transformation are not as important as the capital screening.
The tide has arrived, and mining companies are left with only two choices: either to migrate with the trend or to become history.
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