Bitcoin Miner Stocks Rise on AI Infrastructure Demand

On Tuesday, shares of several publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies rose after reports that miners are repurposing power and data-center capacity to host artificial intelligence and high-performance computing workloads.

TeraWulf shares gained as much as 17% following disclosure of a Kentucky data-center acquisition site. Hut 8, IREN and Riot Platforms each closed more than 5% higher. The broader market advance coincided with the S&P 500 reaching a record above 7,500 and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rising 5.6% on the day; the semiconductor index is up nearly 77% year to date.

A Bernstein research note estimated that 11 publicly traded Bitcoin miners control a current and planned power portfolio of roughly 27 gigawatts. The report said that reliable electricity access is becoming a binding constraint for expanding AI data centers and that large power footprints could attract partnerships with cloud providers and AI firms.

Bernstein highlighted an agreement between IREN and Microsoft and estimated that the deal could support an annualized revenue run rate near $3.7 billion for IREN’s AI infrastructure business. Other financing and capacity arrangements across the mining industry were cited as evidence of growing demand for non-crypto use of existing mining infrastructure.

Bitcoin miners typically built large, distributed operations to run energy-intensive application-specific integrated circuits used for cryptocurrency validation. That infrastructure includes grid connections, substations, cooling systems and operations teams. Companies are converting or evaluating those components to host clusters of graphics processing units or other accelerators under commercial contracts with large cloud providers and specialized AI firms.

Market participants identified execution risks tied to the transition. These include the timing and cost of retrofitting facilities for GPU workloads, the durability and terms of commercial contracts, competition from established data center operators, and regulatory and grid constraints that could limit capacity conversions.

The link between chip demand for AI workloads and the need for local power and data-center capacity has drawn investor attention to miners with idle or underused grid connections. Whether miners complete transactions and win long-term contracts will depend on deal flow with cloud customers, approvals from grid operators and regulators, and the pace of AI deployments across industries.