Miners Beat Bitcoin by 70% in 2026 as Terawulf Locks $12.8B in AI Contracts
Key Takeaways:
Terawulf is the clearest example of the trade working. The company has locked in over $12.8 billion in contracted HPC revenue through long-term leases with Google-backed Fluidstack and Core42, with sites in Hawesville, Kentucky, and Morgantown, Maryland, scaling toward 1 GW of available power. HPC now drives over half of annual revenues. The stock reflects it.
Hut 8 has taken a similar path, anchoring a $7 billion, 15-year lease at its River Bend campus with Anthropic and Fluidstack as counterparties, while building an 8.5 GW development pipeline across due diligence, exclusivity, and active construction stages.
Core Scientific has also seen similar execution. The company has secured roughly $10–12 billion in contracted revenue through Coreweave partnerships spanning 590 MW of critical IT load across six sites, including a $1.2 billion expansion in Denton, Texas. Analysts forecast HPC driving approximately 70% of 2026 revenue.
Applied Digital has signed multiple 15-year leases with Coreweave for 400 MW of critical IT load at its North Dakota campus, generating roughly $11 billion in contracted revenue and running HPC hosting margins above 25%. IREN Limited (IREN), sitting atop the top ten list by market cap at $16.71 billion, has a Microsoft AI cloud partnership valued in the billions and a 4.5 GW power pipeline, with HPC revenue projected to reach 71% of total by year-end.
Cipher Digital (Nasdaq: CIFR), now fully rebranded from Cipher Mining, has exited most of its bitcoin operations entirely, replacing them with a $9.3 billion contracted HPC backlog anchored by a 300 MW AWS deal and a Google-backstopped Fluidstack agreement.
Not every name is at the same stage, and that’s not necessarily a problem. MARA Holdings (MARA) and Riot Platforms (RIOT) are posting YTD returns of 29.56% and 47.04%, respectively. Solid numbers by any standard, even if they sit below the group leaders. Both companies are moving, just on a slightly different timeline.
Riot holds 1.7 GW of power capacity across its Texas sites, including Corsicana and Rockdale, and has begun construction of 112 MW of AI-ready core-and-shell capacity at Corsicana as part of a planned 600 MW buildout. MARA is taking a different approach, building international exposure through its majority stake in Exaion, an EDF subsidiary that brings European AI and HPC cloud expertise into the fold.
Bitdeer (Nasdaq: BTDR) sits at the bottom of the year-to-date table at just 7.62%, still down 6.40% over the past five trading days. The company is building what it describes as Norway’s largest AI data center. A 180 MW facility in Tydal targeting Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs, and is converting sites in Ohio and Washington State, but the pipeline hasn’t translated into contracted revenue at the scale investors are rewarding elsewhere.
Cleanspark (Nasdaq: CLSK), up 25.88% YTD, is further along than Bitdeer with over 1.8 GW of power under contract and advanced discussions with hyperscale tenants, but initial AI deployments aren’t targeted until 2026–2027.
The takeaway from January through April is straightforward. The miners winning in 2026 are the ones that closed hyperscaler deals first. Power capacity alone isn’t enough — the market is pricing contracted backlog, delivery timelines, and the quality of counterparties. Terawulf, Hut 8, Core Scientific, Applied Digital, IREN, and Cipher Digital have all demonstrated some version of that. Others are working to catch up. Bitcoin‘s price direction from here will matter, but for the leading names in this group, it’s becoming a secondary consideration.
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