Bitcoin may be slumping — along with the Nasdaq in general — but one technology investment seems to be doing well: publicly-traded mining companies.
Top U.S. Bitcoin mining companies — Hut 8, CleanSpark, and MARA — all experienced gains between 3-7% on Thursday, despite a sell-off across other assets.
The Bitcoin price was down about 2% Thursday, trading for $64,760. Major stock indices also took a hit — including the tech heavy Nasdaq — but a handful of miners continued to rally on new deals related to high-powered computing and artificial intelligence.
Hut 8 announced Monday that it had signed a second 15-year lease for 352 megawatts of IT capacity at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas — doubling the site’s tenant to 704 MW of contracted capacity and fully commercializing the campus against its 1,000 MW of utility capacity.
And on Tuesday, IREN Limited signed $2.8 billion in new AI cloud contracts. Formerly a Bitcoin miner, IREN is now transitioning to mostly providing high-powered computing to power AI demand.
Both experienced price jumps Thursday morning in New York, with Hut 8 sustaining its rally.
AI deals
A number of Bitcoin miners are focusing on the industry as minting the biggest cryptocurrency becomes harder and demand for AI compute surges.
As the price Bitcoin has dipped, it has become harder for Bitcoin miners to make ends meet.
Instead of dropping mining operations completely, a number of Bitcoin miners have instead marketed themselves as “compute” or “digital infrastructure” companies while switching between minting digital coins and providing compute for AI — depending on which is more profitable.
Top miners Terawulf, IREN, and Cipher Mining all last year signed multi-year HPC contracts with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft.
Both the crypto mining and HPC industries require huge amounts of energy and data centers. However, running AI data centres require more expertise than Bitcoin mining.