Mining Boss's New Business: Collecting Rent by Staying Put, Annual Revenue of Tens of Billions

Author: KarenZ, Foresight News

Original Title: Mine Owners, the New Landlords in the AI Era

The world’s mineral resources will eventually face the point of exhaustion and depletion. Gold in California, coal in the Ruhr, tin in Cornwall—the turning points of resource depletion always force an industry restructuring.

The same applies to Bitcoin mining.

On March 9, 2026, the 20 millionth Bitcoin was officially mined, leaving less than 1 million remaining to be mined. As the shadow of the 2028 halving looms ahead, mining companies are caught in a survival anxiety.

However, unexpectedly, the surge of AI has opened a “second growth curve” for these miners.

Since 2024, AI companies and cloud providers have been fiercely competing for miners’ electricity and data centers. From late 2025 to now, this trend has not only continued but accelerated and expanded. The GPU, power, and data center resources needed for training large models are creating a new demand for computing power.

At the right time, those Bitcoin farms once labeled as “electric tigers” have already laid out large-scale power access, professional cooling systems, and high-power data centers.

These once-standard mining setups have now become the hottest scarce assets in the AI era.

AI Companies Queue for Power, Bitcoin Miners Sign Hundreds of Billions in Orders

From 2025 to early 2026, the old players who relied on ASIC miners to “dig gold” quietly signed AI mega-orders worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Let’s look at the clients in these mining AI deals: Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic, CoreWeave, Google, Fluidstack. These are the core players in the AI compute race, lining up to “pay” miners.

On November 3, 2025, Microsoft signed a five-year, $9.7 billion GPU cloud service contract with IREN (Bitcoin miners and AI data centers), paying 20% upfront.

To support this “computing engine,” IREN also purchased $5.8 billion worth of NVIDIA GB300 chips from Dell, a move so swift it impresses most traditional data centers.

Google, in the second half of 2025, guaranteed $1.73 billion in AI cloud services for Cipher Digital and Fluidstack projects (with Cipher’s total contract revenue over 10 years reaching $3.8 billion), holding at least 5% equity in Cipher Digital through “cloud customer endorsement + ecosystem cooperation.”

Meanwhile, Amazon (AWS) also locked in a 15-year, approximately $5.5 billion high-performance computing (HPC) contract with Cipher Digital on November 3, 2025.

If giants are betting on the future, then AI newcomers like Anthropic and CoreWeave are the “must-buy” customers for miners.

US Bitcoin miners and high-performance computing infrastructure provider Core Scientific, leveraging existing power capacity, delivered 350MW of high-density hosting to CoreWeave by March 2, 2026, aiming for 590MW by early 2027, to provide HPC hosting for NVIDIA GPUs. This 12-year contract is projected to generate up to $10.2 billion in total revenue.

Notably, CoreWeave itself is an AI cloud company originating from the mining industry, with NVIDIA as a key strategic partner and major investor, continuously funding it over the years. Originally named Atlantic Crypto, founded in 2017 mainly for Ethereum mining, it rebranded as CoreWeave in 2019 and successfully transitioned into AI cloud services, focusing on GPU-accelerated cloud computing, especially AI workloads, becoming a leader in AI cloud services.

Veteran Bitcoin miner Hut 8, in December 2025, partnered with Anthropic and Fluidstack, committing to deliver AI data center infrastructure starting at 245MW, expandable to 2,295MW (total contract value $7 billion). TeraWulf, another US operator focused on HPC hosting and Bitcoin mining, signed a 25-year lease with Fluidstack involving about $9.5 billion in revenue.

According to CoinShares data, by the end of October 2025, miners and AI/tech giants had signed contracts totaling $65 billion. By March 2026, the signing wave continued.

Hidden Truths in Financial Reports: AI Revenue Expectations Crushing Mining

Latest financial reports reveal an irreversible turning point: the high-margin, long-term revenue from AI business has created a structural downward pressure on traditional mining.

Mining profit margins are being continuously squeezed. After Bitcoin’s fourth halving in 2024, with block rewards halved and total network hash rate rising, Riot Platforms’ financials show the average cost to mine one Bitcoin rose from $32,216 in 2024 to nearly $50,000 in 2025, a 54% increase—excluding depreciation costs.

This pressure has led to a sharp decline in mining gross margins. Core Scientific’s mining gross margin plummeted from 23% in 2024 to 5% in 2025; Bitdeer’s gross margin in 2025 was only 10.9%.

In stark contrast, AI services are “money-printing” machines.

AI hosting and cloud services generally enjoy much higher and more stable gross margins than mining. IREN’s AI cloud gross margin (excluding operating costs and depreciation) reaches 86%; WhiteFiber (under Bit Digital) also reports about 65%. Even with stricter accounting standards, fully accounting for depreciation and operational costs, Core Scientific’s annual AI hosting gross margin remains around 30%, climbing to 46% in Q4.

More decisively, the long-term contracted AI revenue locked in by miners is vastly outpacing mining income.

In Q4 2025, IREN’s AI cloud revenue reached $17.3 million, a 137% quarter-over-quarter increase. Although the scale is still limited, with long-term GPU cloud agreements with Microsoft and others, the company expects to reach an ARR of $3.4 billion by the end of 2026, far surpassing mining revenue (which was $485 million in FY2025). All this consumes only about 10% of the locked grid capacity (>4.5GW), leaving huge growth potential.

Core Scientific also shows a “shrinking mining, exploding AI” pattern. Its AI hosting revenue rose to $65.4 million in 2025, a 168% YoY increase; meanwhile, self-mined Bitcoin revenue shrank from $400 million to $230 million. The 12-year contract with CoreWeave alone locks in total revenue of $10.2 billion, with stable annual income around $850 million.

TeraWulf also reached a turning point. In 2025, total revenue was $168.5 million, with mining still accounting for about 90% (around $150 million), but it also achieved its first HPC leasing income ($16.9 million). Although small now, it has signed a 522MW long-term contract worth over $12.8 billion, securing steady cash flow for years.

Currently, most miners’ AI revenue share remains low, but the logic of high margins and long-term locked-in orders is established. Once infrastructure is in place and AI revenue accounts for 30–50%, it will significantly boost overall profitability—this is the core reason capital markets are willing to assign high valuations to transforming miners.

As Bitfarms CEO Ben Gagnon stated, after transforming the Washington site into a high-performance computing center, its scale is less than 1% of total resources but is expected to generate higher net operating income than traditional Bitcoin mining.

The Most Aggressive Miners Are Abandoning Mining

Their transformation is even reflected in name changes. Iris Energy rebranded as IREN, Marathon Digital upgraded to MARA Holdings, Applied Blockchain became Applied Digital, Cipher Mining renamed Cipher Digital, Bitfarms plans to rename as Keel Infrastructure and relocate to the US.

This is not just a name change but a public and firm declaration—“We are no longer just miners.”

Based on the degree of transformation, miners are divided into three categories:

Aggressive Embracers—represented by Cipher Digital, TeraWulf, Bit Digital, Bitfarms, IREN. These companies are: rebranding, exiting some mining sites, or even abandoning mining altogether to focus fully on AI.

• Bit Digital has been gradually exiting Bitcoin mining since 2025, focusing all hash power on its high-performance computing subsidiary WhiteFiber and Ethereum assets.
• TeraWulf is rapidly advancing its AI transformation, positioning HPC/AI as the “main growth engine,” with Bitcoin mining becoming “opportunistic.”
• Cipher Digital, besides rebranding, is gradually divesting some mining assets and accelerating AI hosting. Its multiple Texas farms totaling 4.4 EH/s have been acquired by Canaan, freeing resources for full AI transformation. On Feb 24, 2026, Cipher Digital officially announced this strategic shift during its Q4 and full-year earnings call.
• Bitfarms announced plans in Feb 2026 to rename as Keel Infrastructure, with a clear plan to gradually exit Bitcoin mining between 2026–2027 and convert sites into HPC/AI data centers.
• IREN still operates Bitcoin mining but has shifted its core focus toward AI.

Hybrid Mode—represented by TeraWulf, CleanSpark, Bitdeer. These retain some or most mining operations as cash flow buffers while investing core resources into AI data centers.

• Core Scientific’s current revenue mainly comes from Bitcoin mining but has shifted significantly toward high-density AI/HPC hosting, though mining still remains the main income source.
• CleanSpark uses mining cash flow to accelerate power and land expansion, controlling over 1.8GW of capacity—ready to attack AI hosting while maintaining mining operations.
• Bitdeer still sees Bitcoin mining as its foundation but is evaluating acquisitions of land and high-performance infrastructure by liquidating all Bitcoin holdings and issuing bonds.

Some choose to stay true to their original focus—staying in the Bitcoin core battlefield. They believe in BTC’s long-term value as digital gold, refusing to chase the AI hype, instead expanding compute power, accumulating holdings, and deepening ecosystems to ride cycles. Companies like American Bitcoin keep increasing their Bitcoin mining capacity; BitFuFu maintains a dual approach of cloud mining and self-mining. Hardware giants like Canaan and Bitmain remain committed to ASIC manufacturing, providing stable hash power support for the Bitcoin network and potentially reaping excess returns when prices rebound.

Regarding specific transformation paths, the “rent collection and steady hosting” landlord model is the most common. Most miners—Core Scientific, TeraWulf, Riot Platforms, Applied Digital, Hut 8, Cipher Digital, CleanSpark—use existing power, sites, cooling systems, and operational experience to retrofit old mines into AI-ready infrastructure, leasing to AI companies for steady rent. AI firms can deploy quickly with “plug-and-play” setups.

Others, like IREN, WhiteFiber (Bit Digital), Bitdeer, and Bitfarms, are not satisfied with this and are taking further steps—buying expensive chips, building their own pools, and offering GPU cloud services (GPUaaS).

Another “fast track” involves acquiring mature data centers—using capital to buy time and secure market position by acquiring companies with existing infrastructure and customer bases. The most notable example is MARA, which acquired a 64% stake in Exaion, a high-performance computing subsidiary of EDF, France’s largest utility.

The Miners’ Chips

The confidence behind miners’ collective transformation lies in their core assets: existing power capacity, heavy assets, and professional cooling systems. These assets translate into two key advantages: extreme time savings and flexible power dispatch.

First, the time advantage.

Building an AI data center from scratch involves multiple approvals, grid connections, and infrastructure construction, often taking years.

In contrast, miners with approved power capacity, ready data centers, and rich experience in high-voltage power and compute operations can skip most of the infrastructure delays, shortening deployment cycles by up to 75% (according to Bernstein analysts).

CleanSpark CEO Matt Schultz shared a story on CNBC: “We recently secured a 100MW data center contract in Wyoming, competing against Microsoft.”

A miner valued at less than a few billion dollars beat a tech giant worth trillions. Why? Schultz explained, “Because we can build and energize it in 6 months, while traditional AI data centers take 3 to 6 years.”

Second, the rarely mentioned “power dispatch flexibility.”

Training large AI models demands extremely high uptime—contracts specify 99.99999% availability with no compromises.

Miners with a dual “mining + AI” setup can shut down mining operations during grid stress, feeding power back to the grid. This flexibility is precisely what pure AI data centers cannot do.

The Cost of Transformation: Hidden Risks

The AI transformation for miners seems smooth and promising, but the path is fraught with unseen hazards.

Upgrading infrastructure requires substantial capital. Existing substations, fiber connections must be fully renovated to meet GPU cluster high-density power needs. Where does this money come from? Besides asset sales, most rely on aggressive borrowing.

For example, Applied Digital’s subsidiary APLD 2 issued $2.15 billion in guaranteed bonds to secure a 15-year data center lease from Oracle, building data centers at Polaris Forge 2. According to S&P Global, by 2028, its debt/EBITDA ratio could reach 8x. S&P assigned a “B+” credit rating to APLD 2.

Similar financing pressures are widespread. Cipher Digital also issued high-yield bonds raising $3.73 billion for data center projects. Core Scientific, in March 2026, obtained a $1 billion, 364-day loan from Morgan Stanley (initial $500 million fully drawn) for data center development and energy procurement.

The risks go beyond leverage. Delays in contracts, construction errors—each step leaves little room for error.

S&P Global notes that in the Applied Digital and Oracle partnership, delays over 150 days allow Oracle to terminate the lease. According to Jones Lang LaSalle, 57% of data center projects in 2025 were delayed over three months.

Finally, operational challenges and macro environment pressures compound.

Externally, grid access and environmental approval processes in Texas, New York are tightening; internally, talent shortages are often underestimated. AI cluster scheduling, GPU maintenance, SLA management require entirely different skill sets. Coupled with Bitcoin price volatility—if mining cash flow shrinks, AI project investments could be impacted, disrupting the entire transformation rhythm.

High Stakes, No Retreat

In the AI era, the real scarcity may not be chips but power access.

Bitcoin miners—long on the fringes of the tech industry—are gradually moving into the core of this race. They are no longer just miners but are transforming into “digital power plants” for the AI age. In this compute war, GPUs can be manufactured, data centers built, but power capacity and grid access are hard to replicate—and miners sit right at this gateway.

From 2026 to 2028 will be the critical window for this transformation. Can hundreds-of-billion-dollar contracts truly translate into gross profit? Will high leverage and debt structures be exposed by infrastructure delays? These are not just operational issues but matters of life and death.

Five years from now, a new infrastructure giant may emerge in this field, but many participants will likely only be footnotes in this migration.

Once this industry shift around power and compute begins, it will be impossible to stop.