The Bitcoin mining industry has a new favorite hobby: pretending it’s actually an AI company. Public miners have signed contracts worth over $70 billion to host AI and high-performance computing workloads, and analysts expect the sector to pull roughly 70% of its revenue from AI by the end of 2026. That’s up from around 30% earlier this year.

But not everyone’s buying the narrative. Some miners are pushing back against the rush to convert their facilities into AI data centers, arguing that the economics don’t always pencil out the way the market assumes they do.

The great AI gold rush

Bitcoin miners already have something every AI company desperately needs: pre-secured power capacity. Miners can potentially deploy AI-ready facilities up to 75% faster than new builds, according to industry estimates.

The deals reflect that urgency. TeraWulf locked in a 20-year lease with Anthropic for approximately 401 megawatts of capacity, set to come online in 2027. Cipher Mining signed a 15-year agreement with AWS valued at $5.5 billion.

Jefferies has taken notice, initiating Buy ratings on several miners tied to the AI transition, including Cipher Mining (CIFR), Hut 8 (HUT), TeraWulf (WULF), and Core Scientific (CORZ).

Hash price, the metric that captures how much revenue a miner earns per unit of computational power, sits near cyclical lows. The post-halving squeeze continues to compress margins, making alternative revenue streams look less like a nice-to-have and more like a survival strategy.

Why some miners are saying no

AI workloads and Bitcoin mining have fundamentally different infrastructure requirements. Mining rigs can run in remote locations with interruptible power sources. AI inference and training clusters need stable, high-density power delivery and sophisticated cooling systems that most existing mining sites simply weren’t built to provide.

Converting a mining site to AI means locking into long-term leases with a single hyperscaler or AI lab. If that customer decides to build its own infrastructure, renegotiates terms, or simply goes under, the miner is left with a specialized facility and no tenant.

The split market

What’s emerging is a two-tier mining industry. On one side, companies like Core Scientific, Cipher Mining, and TeraWulf are transforming into data center operators that happen to also mine Bitcoin. On the other, a cohort of miners is doubling down on their core business.

Miners with credible AI pipelines have seen their stock valuations re-rate higher, as traditional tech investors enter the picture. Pure-play miners, meanwhile, continue to trade largely as leveraged Bitcoin proxies, rising and falling with the coin’s spot price.

What investors should watch

TeraWulf’s Anthropic facility is expected to begin operations in 2027, which will provide the first real-world data on whether these converted mining sites can actually deliver the uptime and performance that AI customers demand.

Cipher Mining’s $5.5 billion AWS deal is another bellwether. If execution goes smoothly, it validates the entire thesis that miners can become credible AI infrastructure providers.