Billionaire investor Dan Loeb has sold off holdings in what he calls 'old economy' companies and plowed $40.8 million into a former Bitcoin miner that has reinvented itself as an artificial intelligence play. The trade, disclosed in a regulatory filing this week, marks the latest sign that big-money managers are betting the next growth cycle belongs to AI infrastructure — not the industrial or energy stocks that dominated earlier this decade.
Loeb's pivot from old economy
Loeb's Third Point fund reduced positions in several traditional sectors during the second quarter. The exact names weren't listed in the filing, but the move signals a deliberate rotation away from businesses tied to slow-growth industrial cycles. The $40.8 million investment lands in a company that once mined Bitcoin but now leases its data centers and computing power to AI workloads — a pivot that has become increasingly common among crypto miners struggling with post-halving margins.
The AI bet
The target firm isn't named in Loeb's disclosure, but it fits a pattern: ex-miners with existing power contracts and high-density server infrastructure are being repurposed for machine learning training and inference. Loeb is effectively buying into that physical capacity rather than betting on any single AI model. The investment size — roughly 1% of Third Point's equity portfolio — is small enough to be a toehold, not a full conviction bet.
A broader trend
Loeb isn't alone. Several hedge funds and family offices have been sifting through the wreckage of the 2022 crypto bear market to find mining outfits that successfully pivoted to AI services. The logic is straightforward: the same electricity and cooling infrastructure that once powered hash rate can now run GPU clusters. For Loeb, who built a reputation on activist bets and macro calls, this is a bet on the real economy of AI — not just the software layer.
The filing didn't specify a timeline for the investment or whether Third Point plans to increase its stake. But the move adds to a growing pile of capital flowing from old-economy holdings into AI-linked assets, a rotation that shows no signs of slowing down this year.
