Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Slumps But These Mining Stocks Are Up Thanks to AI Deals

Bitcoin may be slumping — along with the Nasdaq in general — but one technology investment seems to be doing well: publicly-traded mining companies. 

Top U.S. Bitcoin mining companies — Hut 8, CleanSpark, and MARA — all experienced gains between 3-7% on Thursday, despite a sell-off across other assets. 

The Bitcoin price was down about 2% Thursday, trading for $64,760. Major stock indices also took a hit — including the tech heavy Nasdaq — but a handful of miners continued to rally on new deals related to high-powered computing and artificial intelligence. 

Hut 8 announced Monday that it had signed a second 15-year lease for 352 megawatts of IT capacity at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas — doubling the site’s tenant to 704 MW of contracted capacity and fully commercializing the campus against its 1,000 MW of utility capacity.

And on Tuesday, IREN Limited signed $2.8 billion in new AI cloud contracts. Formerly a Bitcoin miner, IREN is now transitioning to mostly providing high-powered computing to power AI demand. 

Both experienced price jumps Thursday morning in New York, with Hut 8 sustaining its rally. 

AI deals 

A number of Bitcoin miners are focusing on the industry as minting the biggest cryptocurrency becomes harder and demand for AI compute surges. 

As the price Bitcoin has dipped, it has become harder for Bitcoin miners to make ends meet. 

Instead of dropping mining operations completely, a number of Bitcoin miners have instead marketed themselves as “compute” or “digital infrastructure” companies while switching between minting digital coins and providing compute for AI — depending on which is more profitable.

Top miners Terawulf, IREN, and Cipher Mining all last year signed multi-year HPC contracts with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft.

Both the crypto mining and HPC industries require huge amounts of energy and data centers. However, running AI data centres require more expertise than Bitcoin mining.

This post Bitcoin Slumps But These Mining Stocks Are Up Thanks to AI Deals first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Marathon Digital’s latest production update shows self-mining hash rate rising to 31.5 EH/s, underscoring how aggressive the largest public miners remain after the halving.

For more details, visit the official Ir platform.

TL;DR

• Marathon reported a self-mining hash rate of 31.5 EH/s.
• The update points to continued ASIC fleet expansion after the Bitcoin halving.
• Large miners are leaning on scale as margins become harder to defend.

The post-halving mining market is not gentle. Block rewards are lower, energy costs still matter, and less efficient operators are under pressure. Marathon’s response is scale: more machines, more hash rate, and a stronger attempt to defend production share.

Scale Becomes The Miner’s Shield

Hash rate growth is not just a vanity metric. For a public miner, it affects production potential, investor confidence, and the ability to survive periods when Bitcoin prices move sideways or electricity costs rise. The firms with the deepest balance sheets can keep upgrading while weaker miners fall behind.

Marathon’s 31.5 EH/s figure therefore says something about the consolidation phase in mining. The sector is becoming more industrial, more capital-intensive, and less forgiving of small mistakes.

Treasury Strategy Still Matters

Mining updates are also treasury updates. Public miners do not only produce BTC; they decide whether to hold it, sell it, or use it to manage operations. Those decisions can matter to shareholders almost as much as raw production.

For Bitcoinist readers, the key takeaway is that Marathon is still playing the scale game hard. The halving did not stop expansion. It made expansion more important for miners that want to stay near the front of the pack.

This article is based on Marathon Digital’s June production update.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

This report is based on information from Ir. at Ir