Bitcoin Is Down 44% and Its Miners Are Up 90%. The AI Pivot Explains Everything.
Bitcoin miners were supposed to track bitcoin, but the biggest names in the space have quietly rewired their business models around something else entirely, and the performance gap between the coin and its miners has never been wider.
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The Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (NASDAQ:WGMI) is up 97% over the past year even though bitcoin has lost 46% of its value in the same window. The divergence has one cause: WGMI holds bitcoin miners, and the miners have quietly stopped being bitcoin miners. AI leasing deals at Riot, Core Scientific, and IREN have decoupled WGMI from the coin it was designed around, and anyone still treating this fund as a leveraged BTC proxy is looking at something that no longer behaves that way.
Where the Fund Stands Today
WGMI is an actively managed basket of publicly traded miners. Shares recently traded near $53, up 38% YTD. Bitcoin sits around $63,000, down 28% YTD. Riot Platforms (NASDAQ:RIOT | RIOT Price Prediction) reported its cost to mine one bitcoin reached 70% of production value last quarter, up from 50% a year earlier. Mining alone would sink these companies. AI leasing is why the shares have moved the other way.
Core Scientific (NASDAQ:CORZ) signed a 15-year AMD lease worth more than $14 billion in base contracted revenue across 530 megawatts. IREN (NASDAQ:IREN) inked a five-year, $3.4 billion NVIDIA cloud contract plus a NVIDIA investment of up to $2.1 billion that vests as GPUs deploy. Riot layered a 20-year, 191-megawatt lease with a frontier AI lab on top of its AMD deal, pushing total contracted data-center revenue to $9.8 billion.
The Macro Signal That Actually Matters
AI hyperscaler capex is the macro variable driving WGMI over the next 12 months. The pace at which AMD, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and the frontier labs keep writing multi-billion-dollar power-and-compute checks decides the terminal value of every top holding. Core Scientific CEO Adam Sullivan told analysts “there’s a lot of GPUs sitting on the ground, and those GPUs still need to be plugged in”, and IREN CEO Dan Roberts said “all of our operational capacity is fully contracted”.
Bookmark quarterly hyperscaler capex slides and ERCOT’s Texas interconnection updates. Core Scientific was expecting an ERCOT Pecos load-study result on August 7, 2026, and delays there push AMD delivery dates. Check monthly. A slowdown in AI capex guidance hits these stocks first, because the bull case is now written in 15-year leases rather than hash rates.
The Fund-Specific Signal to Track
WGMI is actively managed, which makes the manager’s rebalancing the single most important fund-level variable. The miners driving the past year’s returns are the ones with signed hyperscaler contracts: Riot at $9.8 billion contracted, Core Scientific at more than $24 billion in potential contracted revenue across 1.1 gigawatts, and IREN at $3.1 billion ARR under contract. IREN alone is up 152% over the trailing year while RIOT is up 66% and CORZ up 43%.
Compare the weight of AI-pivoted names against pure miners on the fund’s published holdings page each month. If the manager rotates into pure-play laggards chasing mean reversion in bitcoin, the fund’s BTC beta snaps back and the decoupling that produced the 97% trailing-year return goes with it. Rising weight in RIOT, CORZ, and IREN keeps the outperformance intact.
If You Wanted the Coin
Holders who wanted direct bitcoin exposure and ended up in WGMI are in the wrong vehicle. A spot bitcoin ETF like iShares Bitcoin Trust (NASDAQ:IBIT) delivers the underlying commodity without the AI infrastructure overlay. That distinction matters more today than at any point in WGMI’s history, because the fund’s biggest holdings are landlords now.
The Bottom Line
Watch the next round of hyperscaler capex guidance from NVIDIA, AMD, and Microsoft alongside ERCOT interconnection updates for the macro signal, and watch WGMI’s next holdings disclosure for the fund signal. If either shifts against the AI-pivoted miners, the 46% BTC drop that WGMI has shrugged off so far starts to matter again.
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Marc Guberti is a personal finance writer who has written for US News & World Report, Business Insider, Newsweek and other publications. He also hosts the Breakthrough Success Podcast which teaches listeners how to use content marketing to grow their businesses.
