Bitcoin Miners Are Pivoting to AI, but Their Shares Still Swing With Crypto
The Bitcoin Mining and Digital Power ETF fell 31% in a sell-off that hit bitcoin miners moving into AI data centers, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported the move on Nov. 3, 2026. An ETF (exchange-traded fund) is a fund that holds a basket of stocks and trades like a single share.
The scale of the shift is easiest to see in revenue. CoinShares estimated in April that AI would make up roughly 70% of combined revenue at publicly listed bitcoin miners by December, up from about 30% at the time, as Bloomberg reported. That is an aggregate across listed miners, not a company-by-company number. It is also a forecast for a December target, not a settled mix.
Individual deals show what the transition looks like in practice. Hut 8 has commercialized the first phase of its 1-GW (one gigawatt, or a billion watts) Beacon Point AI data center campus with a 15-year, 352-MW lease. A megawatt (MW) is a million watts. The company says it will deliver a 352-MW AI factory designed to NVIDIA's DSX reference architecture, a standard blueprint for gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure, according to its May 6 press release.
Riot announced on Jan. 16, 2026 the fee simple acquisition (outright ownership, as opposed to a lease) of 200 acres of land to unlock data center development and hyperscale leasing, meaning large leases with the biggest cloud operators. The same announcement covered a first data center lease with AMD at its Rockdale site. Riot describes its strategy as a pivot from bitcoin mining to AI and HPC (high-performance computing) data centers, as set out on its investor pages.
Core Scientific's arrangements date from 2024, which makes them earlier than the others. In June 2024 it agreed to provide approximately 200 MW of infrastructure to host CoreWeave's high-performance computing services. In September 2024 it resumed work on a substation in Muskogee, Oklahoma, to support a 100-MW data center planned for that site. A substation steps down high-voltage grid power to a level a building can use. Taken together, the three companies show a pattern: existing mining infrastructure being reassigned to large, long-dated power commitments.
Power is the binding input, meaning the constraint that limits everything else. Reuters Breakingviews describes data centers as facing a major power constraint. In June, Bloomberg reported that regulators are looking to ease power-grid bottlenecks that could slow the AI boom.
Read together, those two items point the same way. If megawatts are scarce, a site with secured power is worth more to a tenant than a site without it.
The broader context matters for anyone holding these shares. A fund that bundles miners is exposed to two separate drivers at once. One is the price of bitcoin, which sets the economics of the mining business that still produces most of the revenue today. The other is the pace of AI infrastructure spending, which determines whether leases like Hut 8's turn into delivered capacity. A 31% decline does not tell an investor which driver moved. What it does show is that the pivot has not separated these equities from crypto volatility. In my view, the shares now trade as a hybrid, carrying the risk of both markets.
The milestones to watch are conversion milestones. Signed leases have to become energized, revenue-generating capacity on the timelines the companies have described. The aggregate mix also has to reach the level CoinShares projected for December. Any miner that reports progress on either front will tell investors more about the pivot than a single ETF price move can.
