Miner Weekly: The AI Trade Cracked. Is Bitcoin Taking the Money Back?
This article first appeared in Miner Weekly, a weekly newsletter by BlocksBridge Consulting, curating the latest news in energy, bitcoin, and AI compute from TheEnergyMag. Subscribe to receive it in your inbox once a week.
The trade that transformed bitcoin miners into AI-infrastructure companies is confronting its sharpest reversal yet.
The AI Infrastructure Growth Index tracked by TheEnergyMag fell 11.13% on Wednesday alone, extending its one-month decline to 34%. The index has now retreated about 42% from its record high in June, as selling spreads across chipmakers, neoclouds, power companies and former bitcoin miners recast as data center developers.
The immediate catalyst was a renewed debate over how the AI boom is being financed. Nvidia was reported this week to be considering a guarantee of up to $250 billion to help OpenAI lease a planned 10-gigawatt data-center campus in Ohio, along with separate financing of up to $350 billion for Nvidia chips used at the site.
The discussions revived concerns about “circular financing”: chipmakers and hyperscalers invest in AI laboratories or cloud providers, which then spend some of that capital on equipment or computing capacity supplied by their investors.
Such arrangements do not by themselves show that demand is artificial. They can help customers finance infrastructure whose cost and construction timelines would otherwise make development difficult. But they also concentrate risk. If AI laboratories cannot generate enough revenue to honor their commitments, the pressure could flow back through neoclouds, data-center developers, lenders and ultimately chip suppliers.
Other pressures intensified the retreat. Reports of progress in China’s domestic chipmaking industry and the blockbuster debut of memory producer CXMT raised fears of greater competition. Oil prices and Treasury yields also jumped Wednesday, increasing financing costs for a sector whose projected revenue often sits years in the future.
Few examples capture the reversal as clearly as Situational Awareness, the hedge fund founded by former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner.
The roughly $20 billion fund recently held discussions with existing investors and lenders about raising fresh capital after suffering losses in the AI-stock rout, the Financial Times reported, citing people briefed on the matter. It also offered some investors the opportunity to buy assets from its portfolio, although one source described the outreach as ad hoc rather than a coordinated fundraising effort.
Situational Awareness had gained 439% on a net basis during the first half of 2026, according to an investor letter reviewed by the FT. The fund used borrowing to magnify its exposure, a strategy that amplified returns during the rally but increased the potential damage when the trade reversed.
Aschenbrenner presented the downturn differently. In the July 24 letter, he argued that the selloff had created some of the most attractive opportunities since early 2025 and invited investors to add capital on Aug. 1. The fund’s fundraising can therefore be read both as a response to pressure and an attempt to buy into the decline.
For mining investors, the broader question is how far the unwind will extend into companies whose valuations increasingly depend on AI rather than bitcoin production.
A 30-day comparison through Wednesday shows bitcoin gaining about 6.84%, while every AI-infrastructure and HPC-related equity included in TheEnergyMag’s comparison declined. CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK), the best performer among the displayed stocks, fell roughly 9%. Cipher Digital (NASDAQ: CIFR) and MARA (NASDAQ: MARA) dropped about 16%, while IREN lost 25%, TeraWulf (NASDAQ: WULF) declined 31%, and American Bitcoin (NASDAQ: ABTC) slid 46%.
The divergence is striking because mining stocks have historically traded as high-beta bitcoin proxies. That relationship weakened as investors began assigning greater value to miners’ electricity contracts, land, substations and grid connections—all assets that could be redeployed for AI computing.
Multibillion-dollar AI agreements then pushed some miners further away from their original business. Their shares became increasingly sensitive to hyperscaler spending, chip availability, construction financing and the valuations of AI laboratories and neocloud companies.
That shift worked in both directions. Only last week, mining and data-center stocks outperformed during a Nasdaq selloff as investors rewarded new AI contracts. The subsequent rout suggests that the group’s brief insulation from the technology market was less durable than it appeared.
Bitcoin’s relative strength raises the possibility that capital is beginning to rotate back from AI equities to the big orange. Earlier this summer, the movement appeared to run the other way. K33 Research said in June that investors were leaving bitcoin for higher-flying AI stocks, pointing to 62,794 bitcoin of outflows from exchange-traded products over three weeks, the second-largest such streak on record at the time. K33 warned that the opportunity cost of holding bitcoin had become difficult for investors to accept while AI-related equities were soaring.
The latest price action may indicate that dynamic is reversing, but relative performance alone does not establish a capital rotation. Investors selling AI stocks could be moving into cash, bonds or less volatile equities rather than bitcoin. For now, the evidence more clearly supports a decoupling: bitcoin has held its value while the companies that increasingly traded on AI expectations have not.
Mike Alfred, founder of Alpine Fox and a longtime investor in mining infrastructure, offered the countercase at the Energy Investors Forum last week.
“There’s no bubble, so you don’t have to ask,” Alfred said, arguing that demand for power, cooling, land and data-center capacity could expand for another 20 to 30 years. He acknowledged that the buildout would include crashes and downturns, but said those interruptions would not invalidate the longer-term demand for computing.
His exposure is material. Alfred is an IREN director and told the forum that roughly 80% of his fund was concentrated in IREN and Cipher. Both stocks are down around 30% over the past month.
The selloff does not resolve whether AI infrastructure is overbuilt. It does, however, raise the standard for what investors are willing to finance. Signed contracts, creditworthy tenants and funded construction plans are likely to matter more than undeveloped power capacity or prospective AI demand.
Bitcoin may be regaining some independence from the AI trade. For miners that spent the past year persuading investors they were no longer merely bitcoin companies, however, a rotation back to the cryptocurrency would be an awkward kind of victory.
Regulation News
- Russia detains crypto mining firm BitRiver founder on fraud charges
- Hopkinsville weighs limits on data centers as crypto mine proposes expansion
Hardware and Infrastructure News
- Nebius Details Plans for 1.2GW Data Center Campus in Pennsylvania
- NAVER, NVIDIA, and Brookfield to expand South Korea’s AI infrastructure to 200 MW by 2028
- Bitcoin Power Use Jumps 38% with Greener Energy Mix: Report
- Galaxy Digital Acquires 500-Acre Site for Second Texas AI Data Center
- Core Scientific Pays $42M to Exit Block’s Bitcoin Mining Deal as AI Revenue Surges
- NextEra, Brookfield Plan $100B AI Data Center Campus at Former Kentucky Nuclear Site
- EU lays out $11.4 billion for 7 AI gigafactories as it aims to catch up with US and China
- Dynamix-Led Fund Deploys $95M for Texas AI Data Center Grid Deposits
Corporate News
- Ionic Jumps 26% in Nasdaq Debut, Giving Celsius Claimholders Exit Route
- Core Scientific Lands $14 Billion AMD AI Data Center Deal
- Fortitude Invests $45M in Zcash Mining Infrastructure to Drive Vertical Integration
- Nscale Agrees to Buy Anyscale in Push Into AI Software
Financial News
- Bloom Energy Reports $1.06 Billion in Q2 2026 Revenue
- Bitzero Secures $25M Private Placement for AI Infrastructure and Debt Repayment
- Nvidia in Talks With OpenAI to Guarantee $250 Billion Financing for Data Center
- AI Hedge Fund Situational Awareness Seeks Capital Amid July Market Rout
EIF Recap
Soluna CEO Sees Stranded Wind Power as a Shortcut to AI Capacity
The ‘Mullet’ Mining Pitch Has a Catch: Most Bitcoin Mines Aren’t AI-Ready
AI Infrastructure Isn’t a Bubble, Mike Alfred Says — But Owning GPUs Is a Bigger Bet
