Bitcoin miners are turning their power allocations and cooling infrastructure into AI assets at a pace that's no longer a side experiment. Kirill Solovev, founder of Gomining, says the market hasn't caught up — leaving pure-play mining operations at a steep discount.
The AI pivot gains speed
What started as a handful of public miners testing HPC workloads has become a full-blown strategy shift. Companies that once only hashed Bitcoin now court hyperscalers and AI startups, offering access to their energy contracts and existing data-center shells. The migration, Solovev argues, has moved past diversification and into something more significant: a redefinition of what a Bitcoin miner's balance sheet is worth.
Not everyone is buying it. Pure-play mining stocks have lagged, even as AI-linked infrastructure plays soar. Solovev calls that a mispricing.
Why pure-play mining is 'severely undervalued'
“Bitcoin mining trades at a discount,” Solovev said, without offering specifics on the size of that gap. His argument is straightforward: a miner with locked-in power, cooling, and rack space should command a premium — not a discount — given the demand for AI compute. But the market still treats most mining stocks as commodity plays tied to Bitcoin's price, not as infrastructure plays.
The disconnect is stark. While some miners have successfully rebranded as AI/HPC companies and seen their valuations rerated, those that stay focused on Bitcoin are left nursing lower multiples. Solovev believes that's a mistake.
New payment rails and the discount
Solovev also urged the industry to develop new payment rails — though he didn't detail what that might look like. The implication is that miners need financial infrastructure that better reflects their dual role as energy consumers and compute providers. Today's payment systems, he suggested, don't capture the value of the power assets miners hold.
The timing isn't great for a sector that's already juggling capital expenditure cycles and volatile hashprice. Adding a payment-rail redesign on top of an AI pivot is a tall order. But Solovev's point about undervaluation is hard to ignore when AI companies are desperate for power and mining firms sit on some of the cheapest industrial electricity in the world.
Whether the market starts to revalue pure-play miners or forces more of them to diversify remains an open question for the second half of 2026.
