The 2026 Bitcoin Miner to AI Data Center Boom
The 2026 Bitcoin Miner to AI Data Center Boom
On August 10, Riot Platforms disclosed a new 20 year data center lease at its Rockdale, Texas campus without naming the tenant, calling it only one of the world’s leading frontier AI labs. Shares fell more than 5% after hours on the vague headline, then jumped as much as 25% once CNBC confirmed the tenant was Anthropic. That swing captures how 2026 has gone for a group of former Bitcoin miners: Riot, Hut 8, TeraWulf, IREN, Bitdeer, CleanSpark, Cipher Digital and Core Scientific have each signed multibillion dollar, decade plus long leases with AI labs and hyperscalers this year, and their stocks have started moving on those contracts rather than on the price of Bitcoin.
Add up just three of the individual deals, TeraWulf’s Anthropic lease, Riot’s Anthropic lease and Core Scientific’s colocation book, and the combined contracted revenue already tops $50 billion. The rest of the group adds tens of billions more. None of that money has fully shown up in quarterly earnings yet, but it has shown up in the stock charts.
From Bitcoin Miner to AI Landlord
The idea of turning crypto mining infrastructure into AI data centers did not start with this group. CoreWeave itself began in 2017 as an Ethereum mining operation called Atlantic Crypto, before shutting that business down and rebuilding itself as an Nvidia powered AI cloud company, going public on Nasdaq in March 2025.
Core Scientific followed a similar path with its own mining sites. It began converting mining capacity into colocation space for the AI cloud company CoreWeave back in 2024, well before most of its peers followed. That early move is now visible in the numbers: colocation revenue reached $136.7 million in the second quarter of 2026, up from just $10.6 million a year earlier, and now makes up roughly 83% of Core Scientific’s total revenue. On July 28, the company added a second anchor tenant, announcing a 15 year partnership with AMD covering about 530 megawatts across five sites and more than $14 billion of base contracted revenue, with AMD holding options on up to 2.5 gigawatts more. Total leased customer power capacity across Core Scientific’s sites now sits near 1.1 gigawatts, representing more than $24 billion of potential contracted revenue. Even with that backdrop, CORZ shares fell after the Q2 update, and Core Scientific was the only miner in the group to draw an analyst downgrade that week, even as Cipher Digital, CleanSpark and Hut 8 got price target increases from the same firm.
The 2026 Deal Wave
Hut 8 ($HUT) moved early. In December 2025, it signed a 15 year, 245 megawatt lease at its River Bend campus in Louisiana with Fluidstack, structured as a triple net deal worth about $7.0 billion and backed by a financial guarantee from Google. The lease sits inside a wider partnership in which Fluidstack runs high performance computing clusters at the site for Anthropic. HUT shares jumped sharply in premarket trading on the news, and the company has since described a right of first offer covering up to another 1,000 megawatts of future capacity at the same site.
IREN ($IREN) took a different route, building out its own GPU cloud rather than simply leasing raw space to a tenant. On November 3, 2025, it announced a five year, $9.7 billion contract giving Microsoft access to Nvidia GB300 GPUs at its Childress, Texas campus, alongside a separate $5.8 billion equipment purchase agreement with Dell. IREN stock jumped to a record high on the announcement. In May 2026 the company added a second Nvidia relationship, signing a five year, $3.4 billion managed cloud services contract directly with Nvidia, alongside a right for Nvidia to invest up to $2.1 billion in IREN shares. Even after those deals, most of IREN’s quarterly revenue as of the end of March 2026 was still coming from Bitcoin mining rather than AI cloud services, a reminder of how far these contracts can run ahead of current earnings.
Cipher Digital ($CIFR), then still called Cipher Mining, signed a 15 year lease with Amazon Data Services on November 3, 2025, covering 216 megawatts of critical IT load at its Black Pearl site in Wink, Texas, worth about $5.5 billion in contracted lease payments and guaranteed by Amazon. That followed an earlier lease with Fluidstack and Google at its Barber Lake site. The company later rebranded from Cipher Mining to Cipher Digital and decommissioned Bitcoin mining at Black Pearl as it converted the site for AWS. Cipher funded the Black Pearl build out with a $2.0 billion secured debt offering. CIFR stock has climbed from the high single digits at the start of the year to the high teens by mid August.
TeraWulf ($WULF) signed its own Anthropic deal on July 6. The company agreed to a 20 year lease for roughly 401 megawatts at its Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, a site it had bought for $200 million in February after it was previously used for aluminum processing. The lease is expected to generate about $19 billion in revenue over its term, with first power due in the second half of 2027. TeraWulf shares soared in premarket trading on the news, and by early August its high performance computing lease revenue had climbed to $31.9 million, or about 71% of total quarterly revenue, as its Lake Mariner site in New York also ramped toward full capacity.
CleanSpark ($CLSK) signed its first high performance computing lease on July 14, a 20 year triple net agreement covering its Sandersville, Georgia campus with an unnamed investment grade global technology company. The deal carries a base value of about $6.6 billion for 175 megawatts, potentially rising to $11.6 billion with two five year extension options. CLSK shares jumped in premarket trading on the news. Days later, CleanSpark reported fiscal third quarter revenue down from a year earlier as Bitcoin mining economics weakened, a reminder that the new lease has not yet reached the income statement.
Bitdeer ($BTDR) played its version of the story out in Norway. The company first disclosed a Tydal, Norway data center lease on June 29 without naming the tenant or the price, and its stock fell on the vague announcement. On August 4, Bitdeer filled in the blanks, announcing a 16 year colocation lease worth $4.7 billion, with an 8 year renewal option that could push the total to $8.0 billion, running Nvidia GPUs for what the company called a leading AI lab. Shares rose once the terms were disclosed. The lease also includes a detail that sets it apart from most of the group: the tenant can walk away without penalty after 10 years.
Riot Platforms ($RIOT), the freshest deal in the group, closed out the wave this week. Its Rockdale, Texas lease runs through 2048 and is worth about $9.1 billion in base revenue, potentially reaching $16.1 billion with two five year extensions. Combined with an earlier lease with AMD at the same campus, Riot now has 241 megawatts of contracted AI capacity. CEO Jason Les called the lease “a defining moment in our evolution into a leading developer of large-scale data centers.” By the close on August 11, RIOT had given back most of its intraday pop, even as second quarter revenue rose 14% to $174.2 million. The company posted a net loss for the quarter and continues selling Bitcoin from its treasury to help fund construction.
The Financing Wave Behind the Leases
None of these campuses get built for free. On August 10, the same day as Riot’s lease, Nvidia announced strategic partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to create dedicated financing platforms aimed at mobilizing more than $500 billion of third party capital for AI infrastructure over time. That kind of institutional capital is exactly what the miners are drawing on individually to fund their own conversions, project by project, site by site.
Eight months into 2026, the same pattern has now played out with eight different miners, eight different sites and a growing list of AI labs and hyperscalers as counterparties: a company with power, land and grid connections signs a decades long lease, the stock jumps on the headline, and the actual construction, financing and revenue recognition play out over the following one to three years. Riot’s Anthropic lease this week was simply the newest version of a trade that started with Core Scientific and CoreWeave two years earlier, and with $500 billion of fresh financing capacity now lined up behind the sector, it does not look like the last one.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any security. It is based on publicly available information as of August 13, 2026, and details of ongoing negotiations and construction timelines can change. Past performance is not indicative of future results, and all investments carry risk, including the potential loss of principal. Readers should conduct their own research or consult a financial advisor before making investment decisions.
