Bitcoin miners pivot to AI data centers as power demand jumps

Bitcoin miners are reallocating power and computing capacity to artificial-intelligence data centers as electricity demand climbs. Matthew Sigel, head of digital asset research at VanEck, described miners as “aggressively diversifying their Bitcoin capacity to serve the AI market,” and argued they “still trade at a huge discount to other data center peers on a market cap-to-megawatt basis.”

Sigel said miners’ campuses already function as plug‑and‑play sites for AI because they have large power hookups and access to specialized chips. He argued that AI demand is hitting the power grid after years of underinvestment, creating overlapping demand spikes. In that setting, miners were early to see they could shift capacity to AI and earn more attractive returns relative to mining alone.

Core Scientific plans to sell most Bitcoin holdings this year to fund expansion in AI and high-performance computing, redirecting capital that previously supported mining output into data center buildout and customer infrastructure.

Riot Platforms outlined a similar strategy. CEO Jason Les said last week that 2025 was a turning point for Riot, marked by a strategic shift that is reshaping the company’s direction. He added that by unlocking its nearly two-gigawatt power portfolio for high-demand data center infrastructure, the company aims to deliver significant value to shareholders.

Across the sector, miners built energy-intensive data centers to run Bitcoin machines that can be repurposed for AI. The acceleration of AI activity has lifted electricity consumption while supply in several regions remains tight, creating incentives to lease capacity and services to compute customers.

Over the past 12 months, Core Scientific shares are up 90% and Riot is 91% higher. MARA Holdings is down 35% over the same period, after reporting higher mining costs and a decline in block production in 2025.

Sigel also highlighted VanEck’s NODE exchange-traded fund, which seeks long-term capital appreciation by investing in companies and instruments linked to the on-chain economy. According to the firm, the ETF is up more than 30% since its inception and has $56 million in net assets since launching last May. “The equities are working. That’s where we’ve been focused for more than a year, pivoting out of the altcoins and really focusing on where the intersection between crypto and the real world is generating cash flows,” he remarked.