Bitcoin miners sign $70B in AI deals as WGMI ETF pivots

Bitcoin mining facilities built to crunch cryptocurrency are now some of the most sought-after real estate in the artificial intelligence boom.

Publicly traded Bitcoin miners have announced more than $70 billion in AI and high-performance computing contracts, prompting CoinShares to widen its WGMI Bitcoin Mining ETF beyond pure bitcoin exposure.

"Miners spent a decade wiring up power-dense sites for bitcoin," CoinShares said in a report on the convergence of bitcoin mining and AI. "Those same properties are now catching the eye of AI companies hunting for data center space."

The International Energy Agency projects global data center electricity use will roughly double from about 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 950 TWh by 2030, with AI the biggest driver. Core Scientific signed 12-year hosting agreements with CoreWeave worth $10.2 billion in total contract value, IREN landed a five-year, $9.7 billion AI cloud contract with Microsoft in Texas, and Hut 8 signed a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for its Beacon Point campus.

The pivot lets miners monetize the cheap power, grid access, and cooling systems they built for bitcoin, but it also adds execution risk and customer concentration that pure mining never carried.

WGMI widens beyond pure bitcoin miners

CoinShares now invests at least 80 percent of WGMI's net assets in bitcoin mining and digital power companies, according to the fund's prospectus. Eligible holdings include hyperscale data centers, semiconductor suppliers, power generation, energy storage, and high-performance and quantum computing companies tied to AI, with up to 20 percent still available for broader bitcoin plays.

The fund's performance has already decoupled from bitcoin. WGMI rose 97 percent over the past year even as bitcoin fell 46 percent, according to 24/7 Wall Street, as holdings shifted from traditional mining to AI leasing deals.

Power, not bitcoin, becomes the scarce asset

TeraWulf shows how far the shift has gone. Its AI hosting revenue overtook its bitcoin mining income for the first time in the first quarter of 2026, a full reversal from the business's original model. Core Scientific generated $164.2 million in total revenue in the second quarter of 2026, up 109 percent year over year, with high-density colocation revenue of $136.7 million accounting for 83 percent of the total while self-mining revenue fell 66 percent.

The April 2024 halving cut the block reward to 3.125 bitcoin, and hashprice had fallen to roughly $30.6 per petahash per day by mid-July 2026, according to VanEck. VanEck now values miners with signed AI leases at more than 10 times EV per gross energized power, versus two to six times for those still relying on prospective power pipelines.

The transformation carries risk. VanEck estimated miners had delivered only about 25 percent of leased capacity as of June 4, 2026, with a funding gap near $50 billion between near-term capital expenditure requirements and cash on hand. Multi-year contracts are only as good as construction and delivery, and a single AI customer can determine the future of an entire campus.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.