Bitcoin miners valued as AI infrastructure play as AI-focused stocks surge 21% year-to-date

Something unusual is happening in the Bitcoin mining sector: the companies pulling back from mining are being rewarded for it. Miners that have pivoted toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing infrastructure are outpacing their purely Bitcoin-focused peers by a wide margin, with a cohort of AI-integrated miners up roughly 21% year-to-date while the broader Bitcoin market trends lower. The numbers tell the story Core Scientific offers the clearest illustration of how fast this transition is moving. In Q2 2026, the company reported $136.7 million in colocation revenue, the kind that comes from hosting AI workloads, against just $27.5 million from Bitcoin mining. That is not a company with an AI side hustle. That is a company that mines Bitcoin on the side. TeraWulf is posting approximately 73-74% gains year-to-date. RIOT has climbed roughly 94% over the same period. Meanwhile, the realized hashrate across public miners fell about 13.4% from Q4 2025 to Q2 2026, as companies redirected power capacity away from mining rigs and toward GPU-dense AI clusters. The valuation gap between the two groups is equally telling. Miners with meaningful AI exposure are trading at ...