TeraWulf Drops 4% on Profit Taking After a 44% YTD Run; Applied Digital Falls 3%, IREN Pulls Back

Shares of TeraWulf (NASDAQ:WULF) are down 4% to $16.50 in Thursday’s midday session, trimming a slice of what’s been a 43.6% year-to-date advance for the stock. The pullback is showing up across the miner-turned-AI-infrastructure cohort, and there’s no fresh company disclosure to pin it on.

Also lower, Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) stock is down 3% to $26.22, and IREN (NASDAQ:IREN) stock is off by 2% to $44.28. The declines are broad enough across the group to point at positioning rather than a single-name story, and every name in the trio is still meaningfully higher on the year.

The CoinShares Bitcoin Mining and Digital Power ETF (NASDAQ:WGMI) is down 4%, sliding in line with its constituents. Meanwhile, the Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ:QQQ) is off 0.84%, and this may be a contributing factor, but the weakness in the miners isn’t merely a broad NASDAQ 100 event. The read is a group rotation out, not a wide tech rout.

Profit-Taking Reads Cleaner Than a Thesis Break

No company announcement, analyst action, or disclosure published Thursday accounts for the decline in any of the three names. The mining and digital power fund is falling by about as much as the names inside it, which frames the session as a group move rather than a company-specific event. Moreover, there’s no macro shock on the surface that would target crypto-adjacent equities specifically.

What the data supports is a strong recent advance being trimmed while the thesis remains intact. TeraWulf stock remains sharply higher for the year even after Thursday’s slide, and its last catalyst was the Q2 FY2026 print on August 5. That release paired a wide GAAP miss with a rapidly expanding HPC lease book, where HPC leasing revenue of $31.93 million represented over 70% of the mix.

Applied Digital’s last update, its Q3 FY2026 report on April 8, revealed adjusted EPS of $0.09 against a negative $0.21 estimate on revenue of $126.64 million. IREN reported Q4 FY2026 revenue of $137.2 million on August 27 and said 2026 capacity is largely sold out, with AI Cloud Services revenue more than doubling sequentially to $70.5 million.

None of those operating updates was reversed or refreshed today. That absence of new information is the practical case for reading this session as pure trim behavior across the group.

Analyst Support and a Long-Dated Lease Anchor the Setup

Paul Meeks at Freedom Capital initiated TeraWulf stock on Tuesday with a Buy rating and a $19 price target, a figure Meeks noted sits at roughly half of the Street consensus. Needham had previously raised its target on the stock, citing a 20-year deal with Anthropic for roughly 400 megawatts carrying $19 billion in contracted revenue. The initiation and the target raise are both intact heading into Thursday’s close.

Neither of those items has changed. Anthropic’s initial delivery at TeraWulf’s Kentucky Justified Data Campus isn’t scheduled until the second half of 2027, so nothing published Thursday pushes out the timeline or trims the revenue math on that agreement.

Applied Digital’s Polaris Forge 1 is fully operational at 100 MW for CoreWeave and contributed $71 million in HPC hosting revenue last quarter, while IREN achieved NVIDIA Exemplar Cloud status on its GB300 NVL72 deployment for Microsoft. Both anchor the AI-data-center pivot narrative that repriced the cohort in 2026, and neither operating milestone was reversed today. The same buildout runs on power, cooling, and networking suppliers behind the chips, and we profiled seven of them in a free report.

Cash cushions across the group also remain sizable. TeraWulf reported $2.62 billion in cash and equivalents at the end of Q2, and Applied Digital reported $1.73 billion. Those balances give both management teams room to execute their contracted buildouts without being forced into unfavorable capital-markets windows.

What to Watch

A stock giving back part of a gain and a stock repricing its prospects can look identical for one session and separate over the following several. Investors sizing their positions can watch for whether the group holds recent breakout levels in the sessions ahead.

Any dated release from TeraWulf, Applied Digital, or IREN on capacity delivery, hyperscaler contracts, or financing would be the next real information point. Ultimately, any of those items landing before month-end could reset the tone for the cohort, and traders of WULF, APLD, and/or IREN may want to keep an eye on whether that happens.

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