Several of the companies that mined bitcoin through the 2022 crash are now landlords to artificial-intelligence and high-performance-computing tenants. Core Scientific, TeraWulf, Cipher, Hut 8, IREN, Riot Platforms and CleanSpark have between them announced tens of billions of dollars in AI and HPC hosting, lease and cloud contracts since 2024, and MARA and Bitfarms, now Keel Infrastructure, are building toward the same business. None of them changed industry. What changed is what the market will pay for something they already had.
What a miner actually owns
Strip the mining chips out of a bitcoin mine and what is left is a substation, an interconnection agreement with a grid operator or utility, often a long-term power contract, and permitted land next to all three. That combination is a scarce input in the AI build-out, for a documented reason: connecting a large new project to the American grid now takes years. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's interconnection queue analysis found that projects reaching commercial operation in 2024 had spent an average of 55 months in the queue, up from 22 months in 2008 and 36 months in 2015, with about 2,290 gigawatts of capacity still waiting at the end of 2024.
An AI operator can order GPUs and lease a building far faster than that. It cannot buy its way up an interconnection queue. A miner that already draws hundreds of megawatts has, in effect, already sat through that wait. That is the asset changing hands in these deals: grid position and energised power, with a data-centre shell and liquid cooling built on top.
This is why the deals cluster on land and power first assembled for mining: Core Scientific's sites, TeraWulf's Lake Mariner campus in western New York, Cipher's Barber Lake site at Colorado City, Texas, IREN's Childress campus and Riot's Rockdale campus, both in Texas. Converting that power to the density AI clusters need is serious engineering work, but it starts from the scarce part.
The economics after the 2024 halving
Bitcoin's fourth halving, on 19 April 2024, cut the block subsidy from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC, halving subsidy revenue per unit of hashing power, all else equal. The industry measures that revenue as hashprice, which Luxor's Hashrate Index publishes as the expected daily dollar value of one petahash per second of hashing power. On Luxor's figures, hashprice averaged about $50.69 per PH/s per day across 2025. It averaged a record-low $31.27 in March 2026, recovered 8.5% to $33.92 in April, then set a new monthly record low of $30.37 in June, when it also printed a daily all-time low of $27.74.
Luxor's April 2026 fleet breakdown shows what that means at the site level. It put implied revenue at about $83 per megawatt-hour for the newest machines, below 19 J/TH, $64 for 19–25 J/TH fleets and $44 for 25–38 J/TH fleets, against a network-average power cost it estimated at $46 per megawatt-hour. On Luxor's own reading, the least efficient of those fleets sat just below breakeven on average.
JPMorgan analysts, in an October 2025 note reported by The Block, estimated that the industry's average cost of producing one bitcoin had risen to about $92,000 and projected roughly $180,000 by the April 2028 halving. Bitcoin traded at about $77,900 on 3 September 2026, according to Fortune. Against that arithmetic, a hosting contract fixed in dollars for ten to twenty years separates a miner's revenue from a coin price it cannot control.
The infrastructure side of the same argument was on the Proof of Talk Paris 2026 programme at the Louvre Palace: on 2 June, Chris Miglino, billed as CEO of Axe Compute, gave a ten-minute keynote on the Taostats Stage titled "The Compute Capital Stack: A View of AI's Global Infrastructure Buildout". The full agenda is still online.
How the deals are structured
Three structures recur, and the differences matter for who bears the risk.
Colocation for a GPU cloud
Core Scientific's relationship with CoreWeave is the longest-running. After CoreWeave exercised its final contract option in October 2024, Core Scientific said it would provide about 500 MW of critical IT load across six sites, worth about $8.7 billion over 12-year terms. A Denton, Texas expansion announced on 26 February 2025 added 70 MW and $1.2 billion, taking the total to about 590 MW and $10.2 billion. CoreWeave agreed in July 2025 to acquire Core Scientific in an all-stock deal; on 30 October 2025 Core Scientific said it had not received the votes needed to approve the merger, that the agreement was terminated, and that it would remain a listed company.
Leases to an intermediary, backstopped by Google
TeraWulf, Cipher and Hut 8 each lease capacity to Fluidstack, a GPU cloud provider rather than an AI lab, with Google standing behind Fluidstack's lease obligations. TeraWulf's first agreements, announced on 14 August 2025, covered more than 200 MW at Lake Mariner for about $3.7 billion over ten years, with Google backstopping $1.8 billion and receiving warrants for about 8% of TeraWulf. Four days later Fluidstack took a further 160 MW building, CB-5, lifting its Lake Mariner commitment to about 360 MW and $6.7 billion of contracted revenue, and Google's total backstop to about $3.2 billion for roughly 14% of TeraWulf. On 28 October 2025 TeraWulf added a 168 MW joint venture with Fluidstack at Abernathy, Texas, worth about $9.5 billion over 25 years, with a separate Google backstop of about $1.3 billion.
Cipher's agreement of 25 September 2025 covers 168 MW of critical IT load at Barber Lake for about $3 billion over ten years, with Google backstopping $1.4 billion and receiving warrants for about 5.4% of Cipher. A November 2025 addition of 39 MW of critical IT load, worth about $830 million over ten years, gave Fluidstack the whole site. Hut 8 signed a 15-year, $7.0 billion lease with Fluidstack in December 2025 for 245 MW at its River Bend campus in Louisiana, again with a Google backstop.
Deals with the end customer, named or not
IREN contracted with the buyer directly. On 3 November 2025 it announced a five-year GPU cloud services contract with Microsoft worth about $9.7 billion, including a 20% prepayment, for access to Nvidia GB300 GPUs at Childress, alongside a separate agreement to buy the GPUs and equipment from Dell for about $5.8 billion. Unlike the leases, IREN owns the chips and sells compute, so it carries the hardware cost as well as the building.
The other large direct deals keep the tenant anonymous. Hut 8's 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for 352 MW at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas, reported by The Block on 6 May 2026, is with an unnamed tenant. CleanSpark's 20-year, $6.6 billion lease for 175 MW at Sandersville, Georgia, announced on 14 July 2026, is with a "high-investment-grade global technology company". Riot's 20-year lease for 191 MW at Rockdale, announced on 10 August 2026, is worth about $9.1 billion, or about $16.1 billion if both five-year extensions are exercised; Riot describes the tenant only as "one of the world's leading frontier AI labs".
MARA has taken a different route. On 26 February 2026 it announced a partnership with Starwood Digital Ventures to jointly develop, finance and operate data centres on MARA's power-rich sites, with Starwood leading design, construction, tenant sourcing and operations. It targets about 1 GW of near-term IT capacity with a stated pathway to more than 2.5 GW, and the facilities are designed to switch between bitcoin mining and AI compute depending on pricing and demand. Keel Infrastructure, formerly Bitfarms, had signed no tenant as of its second-quarter 2026 results on 10 August 2026. It reported negotiations at three sites, and zoning and conditional land-development approval at Panther Creek, Pennsylvania.
What the evidence shows so far
Two things are true at once. Equity markets have re-rated these companies: JPMorgan's October 2025 note identified a clear breakdown in the correlation between mining shares and the bitcoin price, with miners trading on their AI prospects. And some capacity is genuinely switched on. On 17 August 2026 IREN delivered Horizon 1, the first 50 MW of the 200 MW it is building for Microsoft, with Horizon 2 to 4 due later in 2026. TeraWulf had 102 MW of revenue-generating critical IT capacity at Lake Mariner after delivering its CB-3 building in early July 2026, and Cipher said in August 2026 that its tenant had begun using Barber Lake, with rent on the first phase expected from October.
Announced and delivered are still different numbers. When TeraWulf announced CB-5 in August 2025, it expected operations in the second half of 2026; in May 2026 it said CB-5 remained on schedule for 2026; by 5 August 2026 it was targeting phased delivery from early 2027. In the same release TeraWulf said it had agreed to sell its entire interest in the Abernathy joint venture for about $530 million. Hut 8's first River Bend data hall is scheduled for the second quarter of 2027. CleanSpark's Sandersville deliveries are expected to begin in the fourth quarter of 2027. Riot expects its first 96 MW at Rockdale in December 2027 and the full 191 MW by June 2028. Keel said on its August 2026 earnings call that final environmental permitting at Panther Creek was taking a few months longer than expected, while keeping its 2027 power-delivery schedule.
The case against, at full strength
Execution risk. A liquid-cooled facility built to a hyperscale tenant's standard is a different construction project from racking mining machines, with tighter uptime requirements and specialised equipment on long lead times. An energised site lets a miner skip much of the interconnection queue. It does not exempt the miner from construction, permitting and equipment delays, and TeraWulf's CB-5 schedule and Keel's permitting timeline show both.
Capital intensity. CleanSpark estimates landlord project costs at $10–12 million per megawatt, which puts its 175 MW Sandersville site at roughly $1.75 billion to $2.1 billion before it earns rent. Riot arranged a $573 million interim facility from Morgan Stanley to fund initial development at Rockdale. That money comes from project debt, backstopped financing and equity issuance, which either adds leverage against one tenant's promise to pay or dilutes existing shareholders.
Customer concentration. Fluidstack is the tenant behind the TeraWulf, Cipher and Hut 8 River Bend leases, so three listed companies carry exposure to one privately held intermediary, cushioned by Google's backstops. An independent analysis by Dave Friedman puts the equity Fluidstack has raised at roughly $653 million and its Macquarie debt facility at up to $10 billion, set against the lease values above. Elsewhere, IREN's Horizon build depends on one customer, and the tenants on Riot's, CleanSpark's and Hut 8's Beacon Point leases have not been named.
Announced versus delivered. This runs through the other three. A headline contract value assumes the full term, delivery on schedule and a tenant that never defaults. It is not revenue that exists today. The useful comparison for any of these companies is contracted megawatts against revenue-generating megawatts, and how that gap moves quarter by quarter.
What is unresolved
Whether the pivot is working depends on the question. As a re-rating that loosened these companies' dependence on the bitcoin price, it has already happened. As a test of whether ten- to twenty-year leases to a small number of AI counterparties, several unnamed, deliver the contracted cash on the contracted schedule, the evidence in September 2026 is a few early, partial deliveries and a longer list of dates still to come. This describes publicly disclosed structures and timelines; it is not investment advice.
The contrast with digital-asset treasury companies is instructive. Those raise capital to hold a volatile asset that produces no operating cash flow. Miners moving into AI hosting are raising capital against dollar rent on physical sites they already control. The failure modes differ: the question is not whether a coin's price rises, but whether a tenant pays and a construction schedule holds.