Cosmic Shift! Former "Power Hogs" Mining Firms Are Collectively Dumping $BTC, Signing Billion-Dollar AI Contracts—An Ultimate High-Stakes Gamble Over Electricity With No Way Out

California’s gold mines, the Ruhr’s coal mines, and Cornwall’s tin mines have repeatedly proven throughout history that the depletion of any mineral resource forces an industry to restructure. The Bitcoin mining industry is now at this turning point. On March 9, 2026, the 20 millionth Bitcoin will be mined, with less than one million remaining. The shadow of the 2028 halving looms ahead, intensifying survival anxieties among miners.

However, the surge of AI has unexpectedly opened a second growth curve for them. Starting in 2024, AI companies and cloud providers have been fiercely competing for miners’ electricity and data center capacity. This trend has continued to accelerate after the second half of 2025. The GPU, power, and infrastructure needed to train large models have created a new demand for computing power. Once considered “electric tigers,” Bitcoin mining farms with large-scale power access, professional cooling systems, and high-power data centers have become the most scarce resources in the AI era.

From 2025 to early 2026, these established players signed AI contracts worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Clients include Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic, CoreWeave, Google, and Fluidstack. On November 3, 2025, Microsoft signed a five-year, $9.7 billion GPU cloud service contract with miner IREN, paying 20% upfront. IREN then purchased $5.8 billion worth of NVIDIA GB300 chips from Dell.

Google provided $1.73 billion in guarantees in the second half of 2025 for mining companies Cipher Digital and Fluidstack’s computing power hosting projects. The ten-year contract for this project is worth $3.8 billion, and Google holds at least 5% equity in Cipher Digital. On the same day, Amazon AWS secured a 15-year, approximately $5.5 billion high-performance computing lease with Cipher Digital.

New AI startups are also key buyers. Core Scientific has delivered 350MW of high-density hosting for CoreWeave, aiming to reach 590MW by early 2027. This 12-year contract is expected to generate a total revenue of $10.2 billion. Notably, CoreWeave itself evolved from the mining industry; its predecessor Atlantic Crypto was founded in 2017 and initially mined ETH with GPUs.

Legacy miners like Hut 8 partnered with Anthropic and Fluidstack in December 2025, committing to deliver starting at 245MW, expandable to 2,295MW, with a total contract value of $7 billion. TeraWulf’s 25-year leasing agreement with Fluidstack involves about $9.5 billion in revenue. Market data shows that by the end of October 2025, the total value of contracts between miners and AI companies reached $65 billion, and the signing wave continued into March 2026.

The latest financial reports from miners reveal a structural turning point: the high gross margins and long-term revenue expectations of AI businesses are exerting a downward pressure on traditional mining. Profit margins are shrinking as the total network hash rate increases after the fourth halving, raising costs. Riot Platforms reports that the average cost to mine a single Bitcoin rose from $32,216 in 2024 to nearly $50,000 in 2025, a 54% increase.

This has caused a sharp decline in mining gross profit margins. Core Scientific’s self-mining gross margin plummeted from 23% in 2024 to 5% in 2025; Bitdeer’s self-mining margin was only 10.9% in 2025. In contrast, AI business gross margins are astonishing: IREN’s AI cloud service gross margin (excluding operating costs) reaches 86%; WhiteFiber, a subsidiary of Bit Digital, has about 65%. Even after accounting for depreciation, Core Scientific’s annual gross margin for AI hosting remains at 30%, rising to 46% in Q4.

More decisive is the gap in long-term revenue expectations. IREN projects that by the end of 2026, its annual recurring revenue from AI will reach $3.4 billion, far surpassing its $485 million mining revenue in fiscal 2025. The 12-year contracts with Core Scientific and CoreWeave lock in a total of $10.2 billion, averaging about $850 million annually. TeraWulf has signed long-term contracts exceeding $12.8 billion. Although most miners currently generate a small share of AI revenue, the logic of high margins and long-term locking-in orders is already established.

This transformation is even reflected in company names. Iris Energy rebranded as IREN, Marathon Digital upgraded to MARA Holdings, Applied Blockchain became Applied Digital, Cipher Mining changed to Cipher Digital, and Bitfarms plans to rename as Keel Infrastructure. These changes mark a complete shift in identity.

Based on their level of radicalism, miners can be divided into three factions: the aggressive embrace group, including Cipher Digital, TeraWulf, Bit Digital, which are actively shifting toward AI through asset sales and renaming; the hybrid group, such as Core Scientific, CleanSpark, Bitdeer, which retain some mining operations for cash flow while focusing resources on AI; and the conservative camp, including American Bitcoin, BitFuFu, and ASIC manufacturers like Canaan and Bitmain, which continue to focus on the $BTC ecosystem.

The main paths for transformation are twofold: one is the “landlord” model—repurposing existing facilities to lease to AI companies, as seen with Core Scientific and Hut 8; the other is self-purchasing chips to build computing pools and directly offer GPU cloud services, exemplified by IREN and WhiteFiber. Some, like MARA, acquire stakes in high-performance computing subsidiaries such as EDF’s Exaion to buy time with capital.

The miners’ confidence stems from their core assets: existing power capacity, heavy infrastructure, and professional cooling systems. These translate into two key advantages: a significant time advantage and flexible power dispatch. Building new AI data centers often takes years, but miners can reduce deployment time by up to 75% using existing facilities. For example, CleanSpark’s CEO once said they could build and energize a 100MW data center in six months, whereas traditional construction takes 3 to 6 years.

Additionally, miners employing a “mining + AI” dual strategy can shut down mining operations to feed power back into the grid during peak load times—this flexibility is unavailable to pure AI data centers.

However, the path to transformation is fraught with risks. Infrastructure upgrades require huge investments, and most companies are resorting to aggressive borrowing. Applied Digital’s subsidiary issued $2.15 billion in guaranteed bonds to fulfill a lease with Oracle, with debt-to-EBITDA ratios expected to reach 8 by 2028, and a credit rating of only B+. Cipher Digital also raised $3.73 billion through high-yield bonds. Core Scientific secured up to $1 billion in loans from Morgan Stanley.

Contract delivery pressures are intense; delays could lead to termination. According to real estate service firms, 57% of data center projects in 2025 were delayed by more than three months. External regulatory tightening, internal AI operations talent shortages, and potential Bitcoin price volatility could all strain cash flow, creating multiple risks.

In the AI era, the truly scarce resource is not chips but power access. Bitcoin miners are shifting from industry margins to the core of the computing power war, transforming into “digital power plants.” The period from 2026 to 2028 is a critical window for realization—whether hundreds of billions of dollars in contracts can translate into solid profits, and whether high leverage will trigger risks, will determine their fate. This industry migration around power and computing capacity, once started, leaves no room for retreat.