A new framework from asset manager VanEck is drawing clear lines between Bitcoin miners that are genuinely transforming into artificial intelligence infrastructure providers and those that are still selling a story. All of it comes with a sobering price tag: a roughly $50 billion near-term funding gap standing between the sector’s pipeline ambitions and actual delivery.
In a research note, VanEck investment analyst Griffin MacMaster and Head of Digital Assets Research Matthew Sigel laid out what they describe as the first structured valuation approach for the increasingly blurry category of companies that straddle both Bitcoin mining and AI data center hosting.
With financial disclosures varying widely across the sector and cash flows still nascent, VanEck argues the cleanest metric available to investors right now is gross energized power — essentially, how many megawatts a company has actually switched on, not just announced.
The gap between those two things is already telling. Companies that have physical leases in hand — including Cipher Mining (CIFR), Hut 8 (HUT), and TeraWulf (WULF) — are commanding valuations above 10x gross energized power.
Meanwhile, names like Marathon Digital (MARA) and CleanSpark (CLSK), which remain more closely tied to Bitcoin mining with limited contracted AI capacity, are trading at just 2–6x that same metric.
“For now, we find that the market is paying for contracted and energized capacity, while discounting everything still in the pipeline,” the analysts wrote.
Signing contracts, VanEck warns, is only the beginning. Across the entire peer group, miners have delivered only approximately 25% of their leased capacity — a figure that the firm expects to decline further before improving, as large-scale construction projects kick off in 2027 and 2028.
That execution gap is expected to become the dominant valuation driver going forward, with companies that miss construction milestones risking what VanEck calls “structural de-ratings.”
The analysts also flag that very few of these companies have any prior experience building out the kind of infrastructure AI customers require — making project management credentials as important as megawatt counts.
VanEck’s deal tracker signals a busy second half of 2026, with multiple companies — including Bitdeer (BTDR), HIVE Digital (HIVE), Riot Platforms (RIOT), and Core Scientific (CORZ) — in various stages of active or advanced lease negotiations. WULF is described as in “advanced negotiations” on a 480MW site in Kentucky, expected to land a customer in the second quarter.
A $221 billion build — and who can pay for it
The capital demands of this pivot are staggering. VanEck estimates the sector’s long-term capital expenditure needs approach $221 billion, with near-term needs alone creating a collective funding shortfall of roughly $50 billion above current cash positions.
The dispersion within the group is wide. HIVE faces the most acute strain relative to its market cap, driven by its AI Gigafactory ambitions targeting more than 100,000 GPUs. IREN and KEEL carry the next heaviest near-term loads. By contrast, WULF and CIFR appear relatively better-positioned, having already secured contracted anchor deals that help de-risk their capital raises.
Funding routes vary significantly. Companies with Bitcoin treasury holdings — including MARA (35,303 BTC), CLSK (13,561 BTC), and HUT (13,696 BTC) — can lean on Bitcoin monetization strategies to part-fund construction.
REN, which carries a large near-term funding need with no BTC treasury to draw from, faces a narrower set of options: dilutive equity issuances or incremental debt.
VanEck: Bitcoin exposure is overstated
The report also challenges how closely the market links the entire cohort to Bitcoin prices. While the group’s average daily-return correlation to BTC runs around 0.55 year-to-date and average one-year beta sits at approximately 1.05, VanEck argues that dynamic overstates the sector’s true Bitcoin sensitivity for companies that have largely moved on.
Only MARA (with BTC-sensitive value equal to ~98% of market cap), CLSK (~53%), and RIOT (~23%) carry meaningful balance-sheet exposure to Bitcoin price swings. At the other end, CORZ, WULF, APLD, and IREN have effectively decoupled.
The analysis shows that a drop in Bitcoin to $50,000 would erase roughly 45% of MARA’s equity value and nearly 50% of HIVE’s, while shaving just 4% off HUT’s — underscoring how poorly the “single BTC trade” framing captures the increasingly divergent nature of the group.
VanEck expects valuations to eventually migrate away from megawatt counts toward delivery ratios, unit economics, and ultimately discounted cash flow models — at which point these companies will begin to resemble data center REITs more than miners.
The firm anticipates that many could ultimately be sold or converted into REITs as their AI revenue matures.
For now, VanEck sees the greatest re-rating potential in names with the widest gap between ambition and current market pricing — HIVE, KEEL, IREN, and Bitdeer — while acknowledging those same names carry the highest execution risk. Companies with anchor deals already in hand, like WULF, CIFR, and HUT, offer a more conservative path to compounding that advantage into long-term market position.