Bitcoin may be slumping — along with the broader Nasdaq — but publicly-traded crypto mining companies are bucking the trend, buoyed by a wave of new deals tied to high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.

Top U.S. Bitcoin mining firms Hut 8, CleanSpark, and MARA each posted gains of between 3% and 7% on Thursday, even as a sell-off swept across other asset classes. Bitcoin's price fell roughly 2% the same day, trading at $64,760, while major stock indices — including the tech-heavy Nasdaq — also declined.

New AI and HPC Deals Drive the Rally

On Monday, Hut 8 announced it had signed a second 15-year lease for 352 megawatts of IT capacity at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas. The agreement doubles the site's contracted capacity to 704 MW and fully commercializes the campus against its 1,000 MW of utility capacity.

The following Tuesday, IREN Limited disclosed $2.8 billion in new AI cloud contracts. Formerly a Bitcoin mining operation, IREN is now shifting its focus primarily toward providing high-powered computing to meet surging AI demand.

Both companies saw share price increases Thursday morning in New York trading, with Hut 8 sustaining its rally through the session.

Miners Pivot Toward "Digital Infrastructure"

With Bitcoin mining growing more difficult as the cryptocurrency's price has dipped, a number of miners are finding it harder to maintain profitability. The April 2024 Bitcoin halving further compressed margins by cutting block rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per block, intensifying pressure on miners to find alternative revenue streams. Rather than abandoning mining operations entirely, several companies have repositioned themselves as "compute" or "digital infrastructure" providers — dynamically allocating resources between minting digital coins and supplying compute power for AI, depending on which is more lucrative.

The pivot comes as hyperscalers and enterprises racing to deploy large language models and other generative AI systems face a well-documented shortage of ready data center capacity, particularly sites with access to large-scale power. Bitcoin miners, having already secured sizable utility interconnections and industrial-scale facilities, are among the few operators with infrastructure that can be repurposed quickly for HPC workloads.

Last year, leading miners Terawulf, IREN, and Cipher Mining all signed multi-year HPC contracts with Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Microsoft.

Both cryptocurrency mining and high-performance computing demand substantial energy and data center infrastructure. However, operating AI data centers requires greater technical expertise than Bitcoin mining, including advanced cooling, networking, and reliability standards that crypto facilities were not originally built to meet.

This article first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and was written by Mathew Di Salvo.