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Bitcoin Miners Pivot to Power the AI Boom

BY | ETF Database
9:20 am ET 09/23/26 | 9 VIEWS
Bitcoin miners spent the last two years building an entirely different kind of business, according to a CoinShares webinar held on Tuesday. They no longer just run machines that verify bitcoin transactions. Instead, mining companies now hold energized land, gigawatt-scale power contracts, and electrical infrastructure that hyperscale data center operators badly need.Key Takeaways: Bitcoin miners are turning spare power and land into the infrastructure hyperscalers critical to AI computing. Shifting power toward AI hosting can produce longer, higher-margin contracts than bitcoin mining alone provides. Nebius Group, the fund’s second-largest holding, runs AI cloud infrastructure rather than mining bitcoin. Hosted by Roxanna Islam, head of sector and industry research at VettaFi, the session also featured Calvin Tintle, senior manager of national accounts and distribution at CoinShares Asset Management US. Mining bitcoin requires enormous amounts of electricity because rows of specialized computers are constantly running around the clock. Over the past decade, mining companies built out substations, transmission lines, and cooling systems to keep that hardware running cheaply. That expertise in grid access and power economics is now the industry’s main selling point, according to the webinar. Hyperscalers and AI developers face long interconnect queues, since high-density power capacity remains scarce, Tintle said. Bitcoin miners already control that same infrastructure, giving them a path to revenue beyond bitcoin mining alone. That infrastructure includes energized land, gigawatt-scale power contracts, and electrical systems built and ready to use, according to Tintle. Miners can also deploy data center capacity faster than most companies starting from scratch. New AI-dedicated buildings, by contrast, can take years to design, permit, and connect to the grid.How Miners Turn Power Into RevenueShifting spare power capacity toward AI hosting or shared high-performance computing can produce long-term, high-margin contracts, CoinShares said. That lessens how much of a miner’s revenue depends on bitcoin’s block reward — the payout for verifying transactions. Some sites already run both workloads, switching between bitcoin mining and AI computing as demand shifts. That combination gives investors two ways to win: bitcoin’s price swings and the AI buildout underneath them, Tintle said. CoinShares already runs an ETF built around that idea, the CoinShares Bitcoin Mining and Digital Power ETF (WGMI A-). The fund buys stock in miners, data center operators, and power infrastructure companies — not bitcoin itself. As of September 21, WGMI still had $323.2 million in assets under management, according to CoinShares. See more: Why Bitcoin Miners Stopped Tracking Bitcoin’s Price Nebius Group (NBIS), the fund’s second-largest holding at $22.2 million, mines no bitcoin at all, per CoinShares. The Amsterdam-based company instead runs AI cloud infrastructure and graphics processing units for hyperscale clients. That shift underscores how much WGMI’s scope has expanded beyond traditional mining. For more news, information, and strategy, visit the CoinShares Crypto ETF Hub.

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