Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher
Mining company stocks are moving further away from cryptocurrency.
According to RootData market data, over the past year, BTC has declined by 46.12%, but Bitcoin mining stocks have not followed the same downward trend. Among them, HUT rose by 363.26%, WULF by 268.95%, IREN by 121.14%, RIOT by 59.90%, and CLSK by 12.41%.
This rally has not been supported by improvements in mining fundamentals. June operational data shows that despite consecutive reductions in mining difficulty, the production of CleanSpark, BitFuFu, and嘉楠 declined by 9% to 29% month-over-month.
It is clear that the market's focus has shifted. Since July, CleanSpark has signed a 20-year infrastructure lease worth approximately $6.6 billion, TeraWulf plans to raise $3.5 billion to expand its data center campus, and MARA is acquiring a project company in Texas with a planned power capacity of up to 2 GW for up to $600 million.
Mining companies' stock prices are no longer solely driven by cryptocurrency prices, production volume, and hash rate; the market is beginning to value them according to a different set of criteria.
The volatility of mining stocks is no longer coming from on-chain activity.
At the beginning of this month, the market experienced a typical disconnect, with mining stocks collectively retracing by about 20%, while BTC held steady around $64,000.
On the production side, CleanSpark mined 614 BTC in June, down from 671 BTC in May, a 9% month-over-month decline. The nominal hashrate was 50 EH/s, but the average operational hashrate was only 42.6 EH/s, with the gap widening from 3.8 EH/s in May to 7.4 EH/s, indicating potential downtime or load reduction.
BitFuFu produced 125 coins, a 29.4% decline环比, with total hash rate dropping from 19.5 EH/s to 15.3 EH/s, primarily due to third-party hosted hash rate decreasing from 16.3 EH/s to 11.8 EH/s.
Jia Nan produced 64 units, a 29% decline环比, with the company attributing part of the decline to grid maintenance at its mining facilities.
This round of mining reward halving occurred after consecutive difficulty adjustments. On June 14, the Bitcoin network difficulty decreased by 10.09%, marking the second-largest negative adjustment in 2026. On July 11, it dropped another 5% to 127.17 T, representing a cumulative decline of approximately 18% from its peak of around 155 T in November 2025.
The difficulty drop should have allowed miners remaining on the network to mine more coins per unit of hashing power, but the output continues to decline.
On the other hand, amid market downturn and declining profitability, some miners are continuing to exit the network or shut down their equipment. Galaxy Research states that miners are entering a period of capitulation, marking the largest retreat since China’s comprehensive crackdown on Bitcoin mining in 2021.
The reason for the liquidation is also straightforward. According to CoinShares' Q1 2026 Mining Report, the average cash production cost for publicly traded mining companies in Q4 2025 rose to approximately $79,995, while JPMorgan estimates current production costs at around $78,000. With BTC trading near $64,000, this spread has persisted for five months, leaving about 20% of miners unprofitable.
According to Hashrate Index data, around March 2026, hashprice dropped to a post-halving low of $28 to $30 per PH/s per day and is currently around $32, remaining in historical low territory.
Classified under the AI infrastructure valuation framework
The new logic is not complicated: what AI data centers currently lack most is grid-connected power capacity, contiguous land, cooling, and factory frameworks—resources that mining companies happen to possess.
They have the capacity for large-scale power connections, sites that can be retrofitted, existing operational systems, and greater familiarity with the pace of building high-load facilities.
PJM data shows that AI infrastructure projects set to come online in 2025 take an average of over seven years to complete, with approximately three years spent securing interconnection agreements and another four years waiting for grid connection. A mine that has already been connected to the grid has effectively skipped these seven years, and this is the source of its value for mining companies.
Take CleanSpark as an example: On July 14, the company announced a 20-year triple-net lease agreement with an unnamed high-investment-grade technology company at its Sandersville, Georgia campus, with initial contract revenue of approximately $6.6 billion, corresponding to a 175 MW critical IT load, with delivery set to begin in Q4 2027. The market response was strong, with CLSK rising as much as 22% intraday that day.
Also in July, MARA spent up to $600 million to acquire a site development company in Texas, with a planned power capacity of up to 2 GW. However, the company holds only letters of intent signed with utility providers—between these letters and actual power connection lies the very span of seven years.
In addition, credit markets are now pricing them according to new criteria. According to Bloomberg, TeraWulf plans to raise $3.5 billion, led by Morgan Stanley, through leveraged loans and high-yield bonds to expand its Justified Data campus in Horse Cave, Kentucky—marking its debut in the leveraged loan market. Lenders are also beginning to evaluate miners’ balance sheets as infrastructure assets.
According to a report by Guosheng Securities, as of early May 2026, the total signed contracts for data center hosting, bare metal, and cloud services amount to approximately 3,201 megawatts of critical IT load, with a total contract value exceeding $91.4 billion. The firm also found that the market capitalization of companies in the sector shows a clear positive correlation with their AI power reserves and signed AI power contracts in North America.
CoinShares expects that by the end of 2026, up to 70% of listed mining companies' revenue will come from AI and HPC, up from about 30% at the beginning of the year. TeraWulf has already gotten there, with its HPC leasing revenue reaching $21 million in the first quarter, surpassing its mining revenue of less than $13 million for the first time.
The Cost of Revaluation: Three Layers of Risk
The first layer of risk comes from valuation.
Mining companies are being revalued based on AI infrastructure, meaning they must endure the overall volatility of the AI narrative.
10x Research reports that Bitcoin mining stocks have largely decoupled from cryptocurrency price movements, with RIOT's stock price showing increased synchronization with the Philadelphia Semiconductor ETF since April 2026.
Bitcoin mining companies are now deeply tied to the AI theme, which currently centers more on global supply chains and competition rather than cryptocurrency adoption or financial digitization. Additionally, the performance of Chinese LLM-related stocks and the outlook for South Korea’s semiconductor supply chain are directly influencing the movement of Bitcoin mining stocks.
After a sharp rally, risk appetite is contracting. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index has fallen 10.8% over ten trading days, and Reuters estimates that the entire industry has lost approximately $1.3 trillion in market value, with root causes including skepticism over the return on AI infrastructure investment, valuations on par with the dot-com bubble, and a more hawkish Federal Reserve.
The second layer of risk comes from the rate of return.
According to Bernstein's report, Core Scientific and CoreWeave achieved a five-year average return on assets of 75%, but the driver was capital expenditure structure rather than deal terms, with tenants covering $750 million of the $855 million total cost through revenue prepayments. Riot achieved a 23% return by retrofitting existing mining facilities.
However, these two are not industry benchmarks; the report indicates that the industry baseline return rates actually fall at 5% for TeraWulf, 4% for Cipher, and 4% for CleanSpark.
On July 1, it was reported that Meta plans to launch Meta Compute, selling excess AI training and inference computing power to enterprise customers; on the same day, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 6.3%. The following day, SK Hynix CEO Kwon No-jung announced that the SK Group will invest 100 trillion Korean won in South Korea to build AI data centers in phases, starting with 5 GW and eventually expanding to 15 GW.
Meta, as the largest buyer, claims it has surplus capacity, chip manufacturers say they will build their own facilities, and mining companies have signed long-term contracts of 15 to 20 years, not realized revenue. This is why mining stocks experienced a 20% pullback earlier this month.
The third layer of risk comes from execution.
Mining companies are now pricing for the future, not for realized income. Take CleanSpark as an example: the company has just signed a $6.6 billion long-term contract, but its current revenue still comes entirely from Bitcoin mining, with its AI business yet to generate material income—the first deliveries are not expected until the fourth quarter of 2027.
Valuation has already moved ahead, but realization still needs to overcome three major hurdles:
The first hurdle is fundraising. According to CleanSpark’s 8-K filing, the cost to build the facility ranges from $10 million to $12 million per megawatt, translating to $1.75 billion to $2.1 billion in capital expenditures for 175 megawatts—funds that have not yet been secured. The filing also states that failure to meet any of the milestones—funding, construction, or delivery—will trigger rent reductions or even lease termination.
The second hurdle is regulatory permitting. On July 14, Governor Hochul signed an executive order suspending the issuance of state permits for large data centers with a grid demand exceeding 50 megawatts. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has paused all discretionary permits not deemed complete prior to July 14, with the suspension tied to the completion of the Generic Environmental Impact Statement rather than a fixed date, lasting up to one year.
The third criterion is tenant quality. Bernstein notes that tenant quality directly impacts the valuation of mining companies; hyperscale cloud providers bring more stable cash flows and lower financing costs, while smaller GPU cloud providers correspond to higher operational risk and capital costs.
Miners' selling logic is decoupled from coin price
The valuation logic has changed, and so have miners' behaviors. However, the more direct impact of this shift on the crypto community is reflected in how miners sell their coins.
According to industry reports, listed mining companies sold approximately 32,000 BTC in the first quarter of 2026, exceeding the total sold throughout 2025. Among them, Riot produced 1,473 BTC in the first quarter but sold 3,778 BTC during the same period—more than double its production—reducing its holdings to 15,680 BTC, a 18% year-over-year decrease.
In the past, miners sold coins primarily based on the cash flow logic of mining operations—selling to pay electricity bills, repay loans, and cover daily operational costs. They were reluctant to sell at low prices and waited for a rebound before offloading. Now, there is an additional layer of transition financing logic: selling coins also creates space for station upgrades, land acquisition, covering capex, and longer-term AI infrastructure plans.
Even if the coin price does not experience extreme fluctuations, miners may still continue to sell their coins.
The same logic determines whether the departed hashpower will return.
Hashrate that previously left the network was assumed by the market to return once coin prices rebounded and difficulty decreased. After China’s comprehensive crackdown on mining in 2021, difficulty dropped by 46% and recovered within six months. But now, what’s leaving may not just be mining rigs, but also the underlying electricity and capital expenditures.
Most current mainstream AI contracts are long-term agreements lasting over 10 years; once mining companies lock in their sites, power, and financing structures into such contracts, it becomes much harder for these resources to flow back flexibly into BTC mining as they once did.
So, mining companies are moving further away from cryptocurrency, or more accurately, capital markets are beginning to value them based on what they become after leaving the pure mining framework.
They still affect the Bitcoin network and still earn income from mining, but the pursuit of electricity, land, and long-term leases is turning them into a different kind of company.
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