Bitcoin miners are having a very different 2026 than the token itself. A tracked basket of crypto-equity stocks is up 56% year-to-date, even as Bitcoin dropped 17% over the same stretch. This week alone, five big names posted gains between 22% and 30% — a rally fueled not by BTC's price, but by a wholesale pivot to AI and high-performance computing infrastructure.
The numbers that stand out
KEEL Infrastructure — the company formerly known as Bitfarms — led the pack with a +30% weekly gain after Chardan initiated coverage with a Buy rating. The firm is repositioning its 2.2-gigawatt power pipeline toward AI and HPC workloads. Cipher Mining wasn't far behind at +29%, lifted by institutional backing and progress on its hyperscale leasing pipeline, tied to its Texas power footprint and balance-sheet capacity. IREN also gained 29% after signing a $1.6 billion purchase agreement with Dell on May 26 for Blackwell GPU systems. The deal is part of a five-year, $3.4 billion managed AI cloud contract, with commissioning targeted for early 2027 at its Childress, Texas site. IREN expects that to lift annualized run-rate revenue from $3.7 billion to $4.4 billion. TeraWulf added 24% after announcing a 285-acre Muskie Data Campus in Eastern Kentucky on May 26, ultimately supporting up to 1 gigawatt of capacity. Initial 500 MW delivery is slated for late 2028. Hut 8 rounded out the top five with a 22% gain, driven by a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas — a 352-megawatt facility designed to NVIDIA's DSX reference architecture, lifting its contracted AI capacity to about 597 megawatts.
Why capital is rotating
The divergence isn't going unnoticed. BlackRock's IBIT, the largest spot Bitcoin ETF, extended a multi-day net outflow streak this week, suggesting capital is rotating out of passive BTC exposure and into miners with direct hyperscaler contracts. The logic is straightforward: these companies are no longer just riding Bitcoin's volatility — they're selling power and compute to Big Tech at fixed, long-term terms. That's a different risk profile, and the market is pricing it in.
Macro backdrop
Bitcoin traded around $73,367 on Thursday, down nearly 5% on the week. The 10-year Treasury yield eased to the 4.47%-4.50% range ahead of the PCE inflation print — a supportive macro environment for risk assets, at least for now. The next FOMC meeting is scheduled for June 16-17, and how the Fed reads inflation data will likely determine whether this mining-stock rally has legs or runs out of steam.
The contracts are signed, the campuses are being built, and the first big revenue inflection points — IREN's Dell-powered AI cloud, TeraWulf's initial megawatts in Kentucky — are still a year or two out. In the meantime, the sector's narrative has flipped from Bitcoin proxy to infrastructure play. The FOMC's June decision will be the next real test.
