Bitcoin miners pour billions into AI as capex races far ahead of revenue

Bitcoin miners are spending billions to move into artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, but the revenue is still lagging far behind the capital being deployed. BlocksBridge Consulting said in its latest Miner Weekly newsletter that 15 Bitcoin miners and AI data-center companies spent a combined $30.7 billion on capital assets in their latest 2026 reporting periods. That is 42.6% more than the $21.53 billion they spent across 2025. For Bitcoin miners specifically, the gap remains wide. Nine comparable miners spent $5.11 billion on capital assets in the first half of 2026, while reporting just $341.2 million in directly disclosed AI and HPC revenue. That works out to roughly 15 dollars of capex for every $1 of revenue. BlocksBridge said the capex figures were calculated from cash purchases and allocations to hardware, property, equipment and other productive assets, after accounting for proceeds and refunds from asset sales. The revenue side is improving, though. Those nine miners generated $205.8 million from AI and HPC businesses in the second quarter, up 52% from the first quarter. Core Scientific, TeraWulf and Bitdeer were among the companies that reported gains. The report said power contracts and available land may give miners a starting point, but turning those assets into AI-ready capacity still requires substations, buildings, cooling systems, networking equipment and, in some cases, GPUs. Bitcoin itself has also moved higher this week. It has climbed more than 13% and moved back above $72,000 after the US Treasury said it would at least double the maximum size of its long-term bond buybacks to $4 billion per operation. The move was aimed at improving liquidity in the Treasury market and initially pushed yields lower and risk appetite higher. CoinShares also moved this week to reflect the shift into AI and HPC. The firm renamed its industry-tracking fund the CoinShares Bitcoin Mining and Digital Power ETF (WGMI). The ETF now has $222.4 million in assets under management and 29 holdings spanning Bitcoin miners, data-center operators, AI semiconductors, power generation and HPC, which CoinShares describes as businesses powering the digital economy.