IREN

Pollack-1953

I bought stock in MARA and RIOT and IREN a few months back. All are Bitcoin miners and all are in the toilet. Worst investments ever.

devCheckingIn

Congrats to IREN with its +30% candle today.

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Post is by: normie_gaurav and the url/text [ ](https://goo.gl/GP6ppk)is: /r/CryptoMarkets/comments/1v8p1ny/bitcoin_miners_sold_15000_btc_from_treasuries_to/ The mining sector's AI pivot is well covered at this point. What I haven't seen discussed is what it means for Bitcoin itself now that the AI capex trade is getting questioned. The state of the pivot: Bitcoin is down roughly 17% year to date. A tracked basket of listed mining equities is up 56% over the same period per 10X Research. TeraWulf gained more than 73%. That relationship used to run the other way. Miners were a leveraged BTC trade: BTC up 10%, miners up 20%. The market has stopped valuing these companies on how much Bitcoin they mine and started valuing them on how much AI compute they can deliver. The contract numbers behind it: More than $70 billion in cumulative AI and HPC contracts announced across the public mining sector. Hut 8: 15-year, $9.8 billion lease on a 352MW Texas facility built to Nvidia reference architecture. TeraWulf: $12.8 billion in contracted AI revenue, anchored partly by Google-backed Fluidstack. IREN: $9.7 billion Microsoft deal for 76,000 Nvidia GPUs, plus $3.6 billion in financing at roughly 5.9%. The unit economics make it obvious. A megawatt allocated to Bitcoin mining yields roughly $80 to $120. The same megawatt running AI inference or training on H200/B200 clusters yields $1,500 to $3,500. HIVE has estimated that 10MW of H100 infrastructure produces revenue comparable to 100MW of Bitcoin mining capacity. CoinShares projects mining revenue dropping from around 85% of total revenue in early 2025 to under 20% by end of 2026 for companies with signed AI contracts. Operating margins on the AI deals run 80 to 90%. CleanSpark said in Q1 that Bitcoin mining investment "doesn't make a lot of sense" at current hashprices relative to AI infrastructure returns. To fund all this, miners have sold more than 15,000 BTC from corporate treasuries and taken on billions in debt. Where this gets interesting: Last Thursday the Magnificent Seven had their worst session since 2025. Roughly $800 billion came off AI-linked equities after Alphabet raised its capex forecast to as much as $205 billion this year and Musk called 2026 "a massive capex year" alongside a profit miss. The concern that has been building for weeks is that Big Tech is spending on AI infrastructure faster than returns can justify it. Bitcoin held near $65,000 through the session. CoinDesk framed it as a possible first sign of decoupling after a month where BTC traded almost entirely as a proxy for the AI capital cycle. The part I keep coming back to: the companies producing Bitcoin's hashrate now derive a growing share of their revenue from contracts with the exact hyperscalers whose capex just got questioned. Bitcoin's security budget has become partially downstream of AI infrastructure spending decisions made by Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon. One good session of apparent independence doesn't resolve that. As CoinDesk noted, a sustained retreat from AI spending would eventually reach the miners, and that transmission is likely slower than the upside was. What I'd watch: Whether AI capex guidance holds through Q3 earnings across the hyperscalers. Those numbers now matter to Bitcoin in a way they simply did not in 2024. Whether miners carrying 15-year lease obligations and significant debt can service them if AI demand softens before facilities reach full utilization. Building AI-ready capacity runs roughly $8 to $11 million per megawatt, driven by liquid cooling and transformer costs. Whether hashrate itself responds. If AI revenue collapses for a miner mid-buildout, the ASICs are the flexible asset, not the fixed lease. Fair counterpoints: \- Contracted revenue with 15-year terms is genuinely more stable than mining revenue. That's the whole point of the pivot and it's a real argument. \- Miners with signed contracts have counterparty risk concentrated in some of the most creditworthy companies on earth. \- The AI selloff was one session. Capex guidance being questioned is not the same as capex being cut. \- Hashrate has proven remarkably resilient to price shocks historically. Marginal miners exit, difficulty adjusts, network continues. \- Some miners kept meaningful BTC exposure and didn't go all-in on the pivot. Not a prediction. Not investment advice. Curious what people here think. Is the AI pivot a genuine de-risking of a brutal business, or did the sector trade Bitcoin volatility for hyperscaler capex cycle risk without pricing the swap? And does anyone think a serious AI capex pullback actually reaches hashrate, or does difficulty just absorb it? Sources: 10X Research, CoinShares 2026 outlook, CoinDesk (July 24 and 27), company disclosures for Hut 8, TeraWulf, IREN, HIVE, CleanSpark. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/CryptoMarkets) if you have any questions or concerns.*