Bitcoin mining companies are leveraging their existing power assets to serve the hyperscaler AI boom, presenting a series of multi-gigawatt colocation pipelines at the H.C. Wainwright 28th Annual Global Investment Conference on September 14, 2026.
Moderator Mike Colonnese opened the panel by noting that hyperscalers are expected to spend more than $1 trillion on AI next year alone, while bitcoin miners have secured over $160 billion in AI colocation deals to date. The six companies on stage collectively have line of sight to over 14 gigawatts of total power capacity for AI workloads.
"Bitcoin miners are a very quick path to solving that problem for hyperscalers, frontier model providers and neo-clouds," said Fred Thiel, chairman and CEO of MARA Holdings. "We are a very quick way of solving a problem, which is getting a lot of AI compute online fast."
Russell Cann, co-founder and chief development officer of Core Scientific, echoed the sentiment: "The things that were the issues have just gotten bigger. Bitcoin miners are in a unique position because we have a lot of those things. We have been dealing with a lot of those things."
The economics of the pivot are stark. Traditional bitcoin mining infrastructure runs $1 million to $1.5 million per megawatt, while AI high-performance computing buildouts cost $8 million to $13 million per megawatt. Core Scientific's direct liquid cooling costs illustrate the ramp: $4.5 million per megawatt in late 2023, rising to $12 million to $13 million in its 2025–2027 pipeline. CleanSpark targets $10 million to $11 million per megawatt for its buildout.
Labor costs are mounting alongside capital. Journeyman electricians command $250,000 to $350,000 annually; master electricians earn up to $750,000 a year.
Deal highlights from the panel included several substantial commitments. CleanSpark holds a lease worth $6.6 billion over 20 years, generating $330 million in annual revenue on a triple-net basis, with exclusivity on 885 additional megawatts in Texas. Its first data hall delivery is expected in December 2027. CleanSpark also holds over $1 billion in bitcoin and $400 million in untapped bitcoin-backed credit lines.
Core Scientific signed a 500-megawatt agreement with AMD carrying $125 per megawatt monthly recurring charges on a modified gross basis, with an option for an additional 2,000 megawatts across sites in Hunt County, Pecos and Muskogee. A separate CoreWeave deal represents approximately $5 billion in net revenue commitment, with 450 to 500 megawatts currently operating or under construction.
WhiteFiber, spun off from Bit Digital and taken public in August 2024, announced roughly $500 million in cloud service deals recently, including an Enscale contract worth $865 million. Its North Carolina campus spans 1.1 million square feet with 50 megawatts online and a path to 99 megawatts.
Bitdeer reported a Malaysia GPU-as-a-service pipeline yielding about $800 million in revenue visibility over five years from an initial 10-megawatt facility, with current AI data center revenue running at approximately $75 million annually. A colocation deal in Tydal, Norway, provides 121 critical IT megawatts.
Big Digital Energy outlined a Hood County project with phases totaling 111 megawatts and natural gas generation potential of at least 600 megawatts. MARA closed its majority-control acquisition of Exaion, the French subsidiary of EDF, in March 2024.
Soluna Holdings, whose shares rose 66% over the past year to $1.15, reported 51% revenue growth in the trailing twelve months through Q2 2026 and a 59% gross profit margin. The company has 6.3 gigawatts of power assets across 30 projects, with 1.6 gigawatts actively under development. Texas alone has seen power requests reach 474 gigawatts against a U.S. available generation baseline of roughly 72 gigawatts.
John Belizaire, Soluna's CEO, framed the shift historically: "AI is another one of those. It is the greatest general-purpose technology we've developed in the last 30 years. I've been a technologist for that time, and I was trained to see these types of waves. This is another big tech wave."
