Six of seven Bitcoin miners lag BTC's 21.5% rally on AI

Bitcoin gained 21.5% from Aug. 17-21, yet six of seven large US-listed miners finished lower, with MARA Holdings the sole gainer at 16.1%.

BlocksBridge Consulting's Miner Weekly newsletter reported that Bitcoin's roughly 23% rally over the past week outpaced most AI-linked infrastructure stocks. Three beaten-down mining names — Canaan, American Bitcoin and Cango — gained between 41% and 67%, while CoreWeave rose about 21%, Nebius gained 17%, and IREN advanced 15%.

Cipher Digital fell 14.8%, TeraWulf lost 11.2%, Hut 8 dropped 8.1%, and IREN declined 6.8% during the same stretch. BlocksBridge attributed Bitcoin's rally to three drivers: the US Treasury Department's Aug. 19 announcement that it would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buybacks for longer-dated Treasury securities, renewed regulatory optimism after a White House meeting where President Donald Trump urged Congress to pass a "fair version" of the CLARITY Act, and a sharp short squeeze with more than $1.6 billion in crypto positions liquidated over 24 hours. The divergence reflects a fundamental re-rating as miners redirect capital toward high-performance computing and AI data centers. Publicly traded miners have invested roughly $15 in AI data centers for every $1 in AI-related revenue generated, with nine public miners producing $341.2 million in AI and HPC revenue so far in 2026 against $5.11 billion in capital expenditures.

The decoupling carries implications for how investors value these equities. Traditional crypto investors may rotate out as miners become more sensitive to AI sector sentiment, while new institutional capital focused on HPC exposure could enter. IREN's $2.8 billion in new AI cloud contracts signed in July, raising its annualized recurring revenue target to more than $4 billion, exemplifies the scale of the transition.

Contract books diverge from today's leaderboard

MARA Holdings leads today's rally despite carrying Morgan Stanley's Underweight rating and the thinnest AI data center contract book among the three largest miners. That's a Bitcoin-beta bounce, not a contract-driven re-rating. Even with a digital-infrastructure pivot underway, MARA's equity prices primarily off mining exposure and Bitcoin's daily direction.

TeraWulf and IREN both carry signed capacity and named tenants that give their moves different meaning. TeraWulf has leased about 401 MW of critical IT capacity at its Justified campus to Anthropic, and IREN holds a $3.65 billion loan package tied to a Microsoft contract plus a separate five-year $3.4 billion cloud agreement with NVIDIA. Long-duration lease revenue from credit-backed tenants is exactly the exposure Morgan Stanley's powered-shell thesis targets.

What's at stake

Bitcoin briefly cracked $80,000 on Aug. 25, sending MARA up 7% to $11.93, TeraWulf up 5% to $16.21, and IREN up 5% to $41.67. The Global X Data Center & Digital Infrastructure ETF rose just 2% to $28.48, well short of the individual miners' moves, marking the session as a high-beta bounce rather than a broad repricing of digital infrastructure.

The divergence also highlights that these equities are increasingly valued on non-crypto fundamentals, making them more sensitive to AI sector sentiment. Keel Infrastructure, which rebranded from its legacy Bitcoin mining operations, has seen its stock climb 56.3% over the past six months on the strength of its HPC pivot, showing how the market now prices these companies on data center potential rather than hash rate.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.