Four gigawatts of AI and high-performance computing capacity sit under contract across publicly traded Bitcoin miners. About 550 megawatts of it is actually sending invoices.
That’s the whole story of the mining sector right now, compressed into two numbers. More than $100 billion in signed AI contracts. Roughly $1.1 billion in annualized revenue to show for it.
Investors don’t seem to mind. Miners with contracted AI or HPC capacity trade at an average of 12.9 times enterprise value to next-12-month sales. Miners without those agreements trade at 3.7 times. You’re looking at a roughly 3.5x premium for a backlog, not a business.
What the premium is really buying
It isn’t the contracts. It’s the electricity.
Miners spent years quietly assembling something AI developers now can’t get at any speed: land that’s already energized and already connected to the grid. Every month that permitting drags on, that pile of dull infrastructure gets more valuable.
The numbers behind the squeeze are worse than most people assume. CoinShares counted at least 225 moratoriums or restrictions on data-center development across 30 states, and 151 of them are still in force. New York has put a statewide pause on environmental permits for any facility of 50 megawatts or more. Other states and counties have layered on their own limits.
Then there’s the interconnection queue, sitting at roughly 2,600 gigawatts nationally. Projects that came online in 2025 waited a median of more than five years from entering that queue to operating. Five years is longer than most AI hardware generations last.
So a developer starting fresh is looking at half a decade of paperwork. A miner with a hot substation is looking at a retrofit schedule. That’s the arbitrage.
The $27 million versus $3 million gap
Here’s the comparison that explains why the market went as hard as it did. A recent transaction valued three fully leased Northern Virginia AI data centers at roughly $27 million per megawatt. Some publicly traded miners with energized but unleased capacity are valued below $3 million per megawatt.
Nine times the valuation for the same fundamental asset, separated mostly by whether a tenant has signed.
The conversion isn’t cheap, and nobody should pretend otherwise. CoinShares puts retrofit costs at about $8 million to $15 million per megawatt. Building out Bitcoin mining infrastructure runs roughly $700,000 to $1 million per megawatt. You’re spending 10 to 15 times more per megawatt to host GPUs than to host ASICs.
But the operating math holds up. AI infrastructure currently throws off an estimated $1.5 million in annualized profit per megawatt for miners. Bitcoin mining under current conditions produces about $500,000. Three times the profit on the same power draw.
Ten of 12 miners gained at least 70% in one quarter
The market priced all of this in advance. Of the 12 mining companies CoinShares follows, 10 gained between 70% and 195% during the second quarter.
The standout is instructive. Keel Infrastructure, formerly Bitfarms, surged 194.4%. It also shut down its Bitcoin mining operations. Investors handed a company a near-200% rally for exiting the business it was named after.
Keel pulled the plug on its remaining mining on June 29 and is expected to report no mining revenue at all in the third quarter. That’s about as clean a test of investor preference as you’re going to get.
Core Scientific paid $41.9 million to walk away from mining rigs
Some operators are eating real losses to move faster.
Core Scientific spent $41.9 million during the second quarter terminating an agreement covering roughly 15 exahashes per second of next-generation mining equipment, redirecting infrastructure toward AI and HPC customers instead. That’s almost $42 million to not receive hardware.
Its remaining self-mining business posted a -56% gross margin over the period. Some machines are still running partly to offset power obligations while sites get converted.
IREN plans to substantially complete its exit from mining by Dec. 31, after booking hundreds of millions of dollars in impairments and markdowns on mining equipment. Its revenue mix already flipped: AI cloud revenue hit $70.5 million in the latest quarter, beating the $66.7 million from Bitcoin mining for the first time.
Cipher Digital has stopped planning new mining capital expenditure and expects Bitcoin production to become immaterial ahead of a likely exit by the end of 2027. TeraWulf has retired mining buildings outright, with HPC leases now accounting for 71% of quarterly revenue.
Add it up and CoinShares estimates at least 35 EH/s is scheduled to leave publicly listed miners as conversions continue. Against the network’s recent 750 EH/s hashrate, that’s roughly 4.7%. IREN alone accounts for 23.2 EH/s of installed capacity, Cipher’s Odessa operation another 11.6 EH/s, and TeraWulf is winding down roughly 145 MW of remaining mining capacity.
Bitcoin recovered, and it may not matter
Bitcoin’s rebound to about $77,000 has lifted hash price to roughly $38 per petahash per second per day, pushing most listed operators back above cash breakeven after a rough second quarter. That quarter was genuinely ugly: weighted average ex-tax cash cost to produce one Bitcoin hit about $75,500, while the token ended June near $58,400. Miners were spending more to make a coin than the coin was worth.
A stronger rally could still redirect capital for companies that kept their options open. CoinShares expects new mining investment to concentrate among operators including Riot Platforms, MARA Holdings, HIVE Digital and Bitdeer, which retain more flexibility to grow their fleets if returns improve.
For everyone else, that flexibility is disappearing. Several miners have committed sites to leases running as long as 15 years. Core Scientific’s $41.9 million cancellation fee is the receipt for capital that isn’t coming back.
The part that has to happen next
Roughly 550 MW billing against more than 4 GW contracted leaves most of that $100 billion-plus backlog resting on construction, financing and deployment that hasn’t happened yet.
Some of it is moving. Core Scientific is billing 437 MW. Cipher started collecting rent from its Black Pearl facility in August. IREN is targeting $4 billion in annual operating recurring revenue by December. CoinShares expects the industry’s AI and HPC revenue run rate to more than double by its next report.
Doubling would start closing the distance between signed paper and the roughly $1.1 billion actually coming in. It would also make the case that these power portfolios deserve data-center multiples rather than miner multiples.
The risk is straightforward. Billions still need to be spent turning contracted megawatts into buildings that produce revenue, and construction, financing or power infrastructure can all arrive late.
Watch which companies report billing megawatts rather than contracted ones over the next two quarters. That single line item separates the operators putting cash flow behind their valuations from the ones still selling a business that exists mostly as a backlog.
