Bitcoin mining companies are increasingly leasing power to AI labs instead of just mining Bitcoin. TeraWulf made headlines this month by securing a 20-year contract with Anthropic, valued at around $19 billion, surpassing its entire market value for its Kentucky campus. Similarly, CleanSpark signed a $6.6 billion, 20-year power lease in Georgia.

These new deals reflect a shift from pure hash rate sales to becoming providers of critical infrastructure. Benchmark, an equity research firm, has dramatically raised its price target for Hut 8, calling it a “power-first data center REIT.” At the same time, Empery Digital sold nearly half its Bitcoin holdings to invest in a data center. This movement encourages investors to acquire mining stocks at hash price valuations while anticipating a market rerate as Wall Street recognizes this infrastructure play.

Market Reaction and AI Advances

The WGMI exchange-traded fund, focused on bitcoin miners, more than doubled over the past year even as Bitcoin itself dropped by nearly 50%. However, from mid-June to mid-July, WGMI fell 34%, driven by cooling sentiment about AI infrastructure and profit-taking following big lease announcements. Analysts remain optimistic, continuing to raise targets amid doubts about miners' ability to fully capitalize on AI compute demand.

On the AI front, Chinese lab Moonshot launched Kimi K3, an open-weight model that topped the LMArena’s Frontend Code Arena leaderboard. Moonshot plans to release the model’s full weights, enabling free access. Shortly after, Alibaba previewed Qwen3.8-Max, another open-weight frontier model. The foundation of the miner-to-AI trade is the belief that compute resources will remain scarce enough to support decade-long leases from AI labs.

The stocks tied to AI infrastructure showed volatility, declining sharply before bouncing unevenly across the sector. This miner-to-AI landlord trend depends on sustained scarcity of compute power. The recent market turbulence highlights the complexity of this emerging niche within crypto mining.