Bitcoin is down about 24% this year, but Riot Platforms is up 94% and Cipher Mining is up 62%.
The reason both can be true is AI. After the 2024 halving - the scheduled event that cuts bitcoin mining rewards in half - crushed mining profits, operators started converting their power infrastructure for AI workloads.
The bet: tech companies would pay way more for electricity than crypto ever did.
Core Scientific lit the fuse with a huge hosting deal with CoreWeave that turned the company from a bitcoin miner into an AI landlord. TeraWulf, Hut 8, Iren, and Cipher quickly followed with their own AI leases.
Marathon, Riot, and CleanSpark are running hybrid strategies that keep mining alive while chasing AI customers.
Investors have rewarded the rebrand. The problem is they've been pricing in the promise, not the delivery.
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A new VanEck report makes the case that signing AI contracts got these stocks moving, but actually building the data centers is the next test.
VanEck pegs the near-term funding gap at roughly $50 billion, with long-term capital needs of about $221 billion if current development plans go through.
So far, miners have delivered only about 25% of the AI and high-performance computing capacity they've already leased to customers, which leaves the rest still on paper.
"Execution, not signing, becomes the next premium," VanEck analyst Griffin MacMaster and digital asset research head Matthew Sigel wrote, warning that missing a construction milestone could leave a lasting hit on the stock.
VanEck says investors are starting to focus on something called "energized power" - the amount of operational power infrastructure a company actually has running.
Miners with signed AI leases trade at more than 10 times energized power, while the ones still pitching future projects trade lower.
Tenant quality matters too. Operators serving investment-grade hyperscalers can borrow cheaper and command higher valuations than ones working with small AI startups.
VanEck flagged HIVE, Bitdeer, Keel, and Iren as names with room to run if they sign more deals. Marathon, CleanSpark, and Riot, by contrast, are still more tied to bitcoin's price than to the AI story.
The next year is about delivery, not announcements.
Companies that turn leased megawatts into working data centers on time and on budget get rewarded, while the ones that don't get punished.
Watch for construction updates, not press releases.
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