Across publicly listed Bitcoin miners, four gigawatts of AI and high-performance computing capacity is already under contract. Roughly 550 megawatts of it is actually sending invoices.
Two figures contain the sector’s entire predicament: more than $100 billion in signed AI agreements, and about $1.1 billion in annualized revenue arriving from them.
Markets have shrugged at that gap. Miners holding contracted AI or HPC capacity change hands at an average of 12.9 times enterprise value to next-12-month sales. Those without such agreements trade at 3.7 times. That is a premium of roughly 3.5x awarded to a backlog rather than a business.
What the premium actually buys
Not the paperwork. The power.
Over several years, miners quietly accumulated the one thing AI developers now cannot obtain at speed: land that is already energized and already tied into the grid. The longer permitting drags on, the more that unglamorous infrastructure is worth.
The bottleneck behind the squeeze is tighter than most assume. CoinShares counted at least 225 moratoriums or restrictions on data-center development spread across 30 states, and 151 of them remain in effect. New York has frozen environmental permits statewide for any facility rated 50 megawatts or more. Other states and counties have piled on limits of their own.
Then comes the interconnection queue, standing at roughly 2,600 gigawatts nationally. Projects that switched on in 2025 had waited a median of more than five years between entering that queue and operating. Five years outlasts most generations of AI hardware.
So a developer starting fresh faces half a decade of paperwork, while a miner with a hot substation faces a retrofit schedule. That difference is the arbitrage.
The $27 million versus $3 million gap
One comparison explains why the market moved as hard as it did. A recent transaction priced three fully leased Northern Virginia AI data centers at roughly $27 million per megawatt. Some publicly traded miners holding energized but unleased capacity are valued below $3 million per megawatt.
Nine times the valuation for what is fundamentally the same asset, separated mostly by whether a tenant has signed.
Conversion is not cheap, and nobody should pretend otherwise. CoinShares puts retrofit costs at about $8 million to $15 million per megawatt. Building out Bitcoin mining infrastructure runs roughly $700,000 to $1 million per megawatt. Housing GPUs costs 10 to 15 times more per megawatt than housing ASICs.
The operating math still holds, though. AI infrastructure currently generates an estimated $1.5 million in annualized profit per megawatt for miners. Bitcoin mining under present conditions produces about $500,000. Triple the profit from the same power draw.
Ten of 12 miners gained at least 70% in one quarter
Investors priced all of this in advance. Of the 12 mining companies CoinShares follows, 10 posted gains of between 70% and 195% during the second quarter.
The outlier is the instructive one. Keel Infrastructure, previously Bitfarms, jumped 194.4% — and shut down its Bitcoin mining operations. Shareholders handed a company a near-200% rally for abandoning the business it was named after.
Keel switched off its remaining mining on June 29 and is expected to report no mining revenue whatsoever in the third quarter. As tests of investor preference go, they don’t come much cleaner.
Core Scientific paid $41.9 million to walk away from mining rigs
A few operators are swallowing real losses in order to move faster.
During the second quarter, Core Scientific paid $41.9 million to terminate an agreement covering roughly 15 exahashes per second of next-generation mining equipment, redirecting that infrastructure toward AI and HPC customers instead. Nearly $42 million spent on not receiving hardware.
Its surviving self-mining arm ran a -56% gross margin over the period. Some machines remain switched on partly to offset power obligations while sites are converted.
IREN intends to substantially complete its departure from mining by Dec. 31, after booking hundreds of millions of dollars in impairments and markdowns on mining equipment. The revenue mix has already flipped: AI cloud revenue reached $70.5 million in the latest quarter, edging past the $66.7 million from Bitcoin mining for the first time.
Cipher Digital has halted planning for new mining capital expenditure and anticipates Bitcoin production becoming immaterial ahead of a likely exit by the end of 2027. TeraWulf has retired mining buildings outright, with HPC leases now supplying 71% of quarterly revenue.
Totalled up, CoinShares estimates at least 35 EH/s is scheduled to leave publicly listed miners as conversions continue. Set against the network’s recent 750 EH/s hashrate, that works out to roughly 4.7%. IREN on its own accounts for 23.2 EH/s of installed capacity, Cipher’s Odessa operation another 11.6 EH/s, and TeraWulf is winding down roughly 145 MW of remaining mining capacity.
Bitcoin recovered, and it may not matter
Bitcoin’s rebound to about $77,000 has pushed hash price up to roughly $38 per petahash per second per day, carrying most listed operators back above cash breakeven after a punishing second quarter. Punishing is fair: weighted average ex-tax cash cost to produce one Bitcoin reached about $75,500, while the token finished June near $58,400. Miners were paying more to make a coin than the coin was worth.
A stronger rally could still pull capital back toward companies that kept their options open. CoinShares expects new mining investment to cluster among operators including Riot Platforms, MARA Holdings, HIVE Digital and Bitdeer, which retain more flexibility to grow their fleets should returns improve.
For everyone else, that flexibility is vanishing. Several miners have committed sites to leases running as long as 15 years. Core Scientific’s $41.9 million cancellation fee is the receipt for capital that isn’t coming back.
What still has to happen
With roughly 550 MW billing against more than 4 GW contracted, the bulk of that $100 billion-plus backlog rests on construction, financing and deployment that hasn’t taken place yet.
Parts of it are in motion. Core Scientific is billing 437 MW. Cipher began collecting rent at its Black Pearl facility in August. IREN is targeting $4 billion in annual operating recurring revenue by December. CoinShares expects the industry’s AI and HPC revenue run rate to more than double by the time it next reports.
A doubling would begin narrowing the distance between signed paper and the roughly $1.1 billion genuinely coming in. It would also bolster the argument that these power portfolios deserve data-center multiples rather than miner multiples.
The risk is straightforward. Billions still have to be spent turning contracted megawatts into buildings that generate revenue, and construction, financing or power infrastructure can each arrive late.
Over the next two quarters, watch which companies report billing megawatts rather than contracted ones. That single line item divides the operators putting cash flow behind their valuations from those still selling a business that exists mostly as a backlog.