Bitcoin may be down, along with the Nasdaq as a whole, but one technology investment seems to be doing well: publicly traded mining companies.
Top US Bitcoin mining companies Hut8, CleanSpark, and MARA all rose between 3 and 7% on Thursday, even as all other assets fell.
Bitcoin prices fell about 2% on Thursday, trading at $64,760. Major stock indexes, including the tech-heavy Nasdaq, also fell, but a small number of miners continued to rise on new deals related to high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.
Hut 8 announced Monday that it has signed a second 15-year lease for 352 megawatts of IT capacity at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas. This will allow the site’s tenants to double their contracted capacity to 704MW and fully commercialize the campus for a commercial capacity of 1,000MW.
And on Tuesday, IREN Limited signed a new $2.8 billion AI cloud contract. Formerly a Bitcoin miner, IREN has now transitioned primarily to providing high-performance computing to power AI demand.
Prices for both companies soared in the New York market on Thursday morning, with Hut8 holding steady.
AI trading
Many Bitcoin miners are turning their attention to the industry as the largest cryptocurrency becomes harder to mint and demand for AI computing soars.
As the price of Bitcoin falls, it becomes harder for Bitcoin miners to make a living.
Rather than abandoning mining operations altogether, many Bitcoin miners advertise themselves as “computing” or “digital infrastructure” companies, switching between minting digital coins and providing computing for AI, depending on which is more profitable.
Top miners Terawulf, IREN and Cipher Mining all signed multi-year HPC deals with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft last year.
Both the crypto mining industry and the HPC industry require large amounts of energy and data centers. However, running an AI data center requires more expertise than Bitcoin mining.
This article first appeared in Bitcoin Magazine and was written by Mathew Di Salvo.
