For years, Bitcoin miners competed for one thing: cheap power to run their machines. That power has turned out to be the scarcest resource in the AI boom. Now the miners are becoming landlords to Microsoft, Amazon and the world’s biggest AI labs.
Last Friday, Bitcoin fell below $75,000, its lowest since August and about 40% below its October 2025 record. On the same day, shares of Bitcoin miners Riot Platforms and Bitdeer jumped about 13%.
That sounds like a contradiction. It isn’t. Many Bitcoin miners are no longer primarily in the Bitcoin business.
Mining Bitcoin requires vast amounts of electricity. Over the past decade, miners built enormous facilities in places such as Texas, signing long-term power contracts, building substations and securing connections to the electricity grid.
Then the AI boom arrived. AI data centres need even more power, and power is now the bottleneck. You can order chips, but you can’t quickly conjure a gigawatt grid connection. Miners already had what AI companies desperately needed: land, power and permits.
The economics explain the pivot. In the June quarter, Riot’s Bitcoin mining business earned a gross margin of about 30%. Its data centre leases earned about 84%.
The deals
The scale is extraordinary.
Riot Platforms signed a 15-year lease for its entire Corsicana campus in Texas with a leading frontier AI lab: 910 megawatts of capacity and about $28 billion of contracted revenue.
Including an earlier 191-megawatt lease with the same lab at Rockdale and a 50-megawatt lease with chipmaker AMD, Riot now has 1,151 megawatts under contract and about $38 billion of contracted data centre revenue.
It expects more than $2 billion of average annual net operating income at full deployment. Riot’s market value is about $6.3 billion.
IREN has gone furthest. Its AI cloud revenue nearly tripled to $200 million in the September quarter, while Bitcoin mining revenue fell to $28 million. A quarter earlier, the two were roughly equal. IREN has a $9.7 billion contract with Microsoft and a $3.4 billion contract with Nvidia, and a revenue backlog of $20.3 billion.
Cipher, now renamed Cipher Digital, signed a 15-year, $5.5 billion lease with Amazon Web Services and a $3 billion deal with Fluidstack, backed by Google.
Hut 8 signed a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease in Texas, alongside a $7 billion lease with Fluidstack in Louisiana. TeraWulf has multi-billion-dollar Fluidstack contracts backed by Google, plus a 20-year lease with Anthropic reported at about $19 billion. Bitdeer signed a $4.7 billion deal.
The catch
These are long-term contracts, not cash in hand. Riot’s Corsicana campus won’t be fully running until mid-2028. Building AI-ready facilities costs billions, and the industry faces a funding gap.
Customer concentration is another risk. Some miners depend on a single AI lab or startup tenant, which is why backing from Google, Amazon and Microsoft matters so much. And the AI boom itself faces new scrutiny: in the US, the political debate over data centres’ strain on power bills intensified after this month’s midterm elections.
For Indian readers, the lesson travels well. As India builds its own AI and data centre capacity, the scarcest asset may not be chips or software, but reliable power, land and grid connections.
Companies that already control those, from telecom groups buying data centre land to power producers, could find their assets revalued, just as America’s Bitcoin miners have.
The miners set out to dig digital gold. They ended up discovering that the electricity they used to do it was worth far more.
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