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Publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies have had a rough week, with nearly all major miners posting double-digit declines, as the sector has suddenly followed Bitcoin itself.
In the last five trading days, names such as Cipher, Applied Digital, Core Scientific, CleanSpark and Bitdeer fell between 23% and 52%, while other operators such as Riot and Hut 8 saw mid-teens losses.
Bitcoin (BTC) was trading around $94,400 at the time of writing, up about 9% over the past seven days.
Zooming out, a Miner Mag report on Thursday showed that public mining stocks have lost more than $20 billion in market value in the past month, dropping about 25% since mid-October and sharply outpacing Bitcoin’s decline.
The decline came even as institutions such as Jane Street, Fidelity and Barclays increased their positions in several major miners.
Despite recent losses, some mining companies have outperformed Bitcoin on a year-to-date basis.
IREN, the largest public Bitcoin miner by market cap, is up about 370% year-to-date, while Cipher Mining has earned about 210%. In comparison, Bitcoin itself is only about 1.5% in the same period, according to at TradingView.
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Bitcoin miners turn to AI and HPC
Despite strong year-to-date gains for many Bitcoin mining stocks, mining remains one increasingly challenging business. With block rewards cutting in half roughly every four years, many miners have adopted new strategies to diversify their income, while others are exiting altogether.
The biggest shift has been towards AI and high-performance computing (HPC), as miners bring back their power-heavy data centers for more stable, higher-margin workloads. With existing infrastructure already optimized for power and cooling, many miners now see HPC integration as an essential part of their business.
On Friday, Bitfarms stock fell sharply after the company he said lay down Bitcoin mining operations over the next two years, starting with the closure of its 18 megawatt site in Washington, as it plans to convert its facilities into AI and HPC data centers.
Other miners are opting for a hybrid approach rather than exiting Bitcoin mining entirely. In June, Core Scientific signed a $3.5 billion deal with AI cloud provider CoreWeave to provide 200 megawatts of hosting capacity for HPC workloads.
In October, CleanSpark shares soared about 13% in a day after the miner announced its first move in AI, and in early November, IREN signed a five-year, $9.7 billion deal to provide Microsoft access to Nvidia GPUs hosted in its data centers.
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