The Bitcoin mining and digital infrastructure sectors had a dual character during the first four months of 2026. Bitcoin itself started the year around $88,700 and spent most of its time declining, hovering around $76,000 to $78,000 by the end of April, a decline of about 12% since January 1st. Against that backdrop, the performance of top mining stocks tells a story that has little to do with Bitcoin. Bitcoin already.
Important points:
- Bitcoin mining stocks have dramatically outperformed BTC itself in 2026, with most of the top 10 publicly traded mining organizations posting year-to-date (YTD) gains of 25-73%, while Bitcoin has been in the red by about 12% since January 1st.
- Outperformance is not about mining. It’s about artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. Leaders have collectively secured tens of billions of dollars in HPC contract revenue through long-running hyperscalar deals, effectively reevaluating their companies’ value as data center operators.
- Terawulf (WULF) leads the top 10 public miners with over $12.8 billion in HPC contract revenue and a 73.58% year-to-date return, with contracts totaling over 1 GW of site-wide available power backed by Google-backed Fluidstack and Core42.
Anthropic and Google sign multi-billion dollar lease agreement with Bitcoin miners
Most of the 10 major listed miners have significantly exceeded their underlying assets. Terrawolf (NASDAQ: WULF) leads the group with a year-to-date gain of 73.58%. Hut 8 Corp. (Nasdaq: HUT) follows with 67.75% and is trading at $77.06, the highest stock price among the top 10 publicly traded miners by market valuation.
Riot Platforms (NASDAQ: RIOT) is up 47.04%, while Applied Digital (NASDAQ: APLD) and Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ) are both up over 40%. These are no humble beats. These companies have recorded inverse equity returns of four to six times the movement of Bitcoin. The reason lies in AI.
The sector underwent a fundamental repositioning in early 2026. Miners are responsible for assets that hyperscalers urgently desire, including access to low-cost power, industrial-scale sites, and grid expertise. Companies that are quick to transform their infrastructure into AI and high performance computing (HPC) data centers are being rewarded. Those who don’t will be left behind.
When miners started mining Bitcoin, they already knew the most difficult part. They have spent years solving problems that traditional real estate developers and technology companies would take years to replicate, such as permitting large power loads, negotiating with power companies, building substations, managing large-scale heat dissipation, and running 24/7 operations with high uptime requirements. That’s no small thing. Procuring power alone can take years and halt most data center projects before they even begin.
Terrawolf is the clearest example of this trade working. The company has secured more than $12.8 billion in contracted HPC revenue through long-term leases with Google-backed Fluidstack and Core42, with sites in Hawesville, Kentucky and Morgantown, Maryland, and 1 GW of available power. HPC currently accounts for more than half of annual revenue. Stock prices reflect that.
Hut 8 is following a similar path, signing a $7 billion, 15-year lease on its Riverbend campus with Anthropic and Fluidstack, while building an 8.5 GW development pipeline across due diligence, exclusivity, and construction stages.
Core Scientific witnessed similar executions. The company secured approximately $10 billion to $12 billion in contract revenue through the Coreweave partnership, which spans 590 MW of critical IT workloads across six locations, including a $1.2 billion expansion in Denton, Texas. Analysts predict that HPC will account for approximately 70% of revenue in 2026.
Applied Digital has entered into multiple 15-year lease agreements with Coreweave for 400 MW of critical IT workload at its North Dakota campus, generating approximately $11 billion in contracted revenue and maintaining HPC hosting margins of over 25%. IREN Limited (IREN) tops the Top 10 list with a market capitalization of $16.71 billion, has a multi-billion dollar Microsoft AI cloud partnership and a 4.5 GW power pipeline, with HPC revenue expected to reach 71% of the total by year-end.
Now fully rebranded from Cipher Mining, Cipher Digital (Nasdaq: CIFR) has completely exited most of its Bitcoin business, leaving behind a $9.3 billion contracted HPC backlog backed by a 300 MW AWS contract and a Google-backstopped Fluidstack contract.
Not all names are at the same stage, but that doesn’t necessarily matter. MARA Holdings (MARA) and Riot Platforms (RIOT) have returned 29.56% and 47.04% year-to-date, respectively. A solid number by any standard, even if it ranks below the group leader. Both companies operate on slightly different timelines.
Riot has 1.7 GW of power capacity and has begun construction across its Texas locations, including Corsicana and Rockdale. 112 MW of AI-enabled core-and-shell capacity in Corsicana as part of a planned 600 MW expansion. MARA is taking a different approach, building international exposure through a majority stake in Exaion, an EDF subsidiary that brings together European AI and HPC cloud expertise.
BitDeer (NASDAQ: BTDR) is at the bottom year-to-date with just 7.62%, but is still down 6.40% in the past five trading days. The company is building what it calls Norway’s largest AI data center. The 180 MW facility in Tydal is targeting Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs and converting sites in Ohio and Washington, but the pipeline hasn’t led to contract revenues on the scale investors would be compensated elsewhere.
Cleanspark (Nasdaq: CLSK) is up 25.88% year-to-date and is further ahead of Bitdeer, with over 1.8 GW of power contracts and advanced discussions with hyperscale tenants, but initial AI deployments are not targeted until 2026-2027.
The points from January to April are simple. The winning miner in 2026 will be the first miner to close a deal with a hyperscaler. Power capacity alone is not enough. The market sets prices by considering contract balances, delivery dates, and the quality of counterparties. Terawulf, Hut 8, Core Scientific, Applied Digital, IREN, and Cipher Digital have all demonstrated some version of it. Others are also working to catch up. The direction of Bitcoin price from here will be important, but it is becoming a secondary consideration for the major stocks in this group.
