Former Bitcoin miners are quietly signing billion-dollar contracts with hyperscalers and frontier AI labs, and the reason has nothing to do with GPUs. Three mid-cap stocks are racing to claim the one bottleneck even NVIDIA cannot manufacture.
This edition covers GPU cloud and hosting capacity, and specifically the former Bitcoin miners repurposing power-advantaged sites into leased AI infrastructure. The bottleneck is secured megawatts, permitted land, and utility interconnects that take years to originate. Applied Digital’s management, on its most recent earnings call, framed the demand backdrop by citing hyperscaler annual CapEx reportedly rising from roughly $400 billion to $700 billion.
Three U.S.-listed miners have leaned into that shift by leasing capacity to hyperscalers and frontier labs. All three are speculative, high-volatility, mid-cap AI infrastructure names with heavy CapEx, dilution exposure, and customer concentration. Position sizing matters accordingly.
Applied Digital: CoreWeave’s Landlord Scales the Franchise
Applied Digital (NASDAQ:APLD) converts North Dakota power access into purpose-built AI factory campuses that it leases to hyperscalers. It houses the racks, cooling, and electrical plant. The tenant brings the GPUs. Market cap sits near $7.72 billion, and shares traded around $27.02 on Sept. 10, up more than 59% over the past year but down 3.88% year to date (YTD).
Fiscal Q3 revenue hit $126.64M, up 139.3% YoY, beating consensus by 61.37%, with adjusted EPS of 9 cents versus a 21-cent loss expected. HPC hosting delivered $71.0 million, including $44.1 million of base rent from CoreWeave at Polaris Forge 1, described as one of the only 100 MW direct-to-chip liquid-cooled data centers online. On the July call, CEO Wes Cummins said the company had reached $36 billion of total contracted long-term lease value, with approximately $20 billion added last quarter, and disclosed 1.41 gigawatts of contracted critical IT load across campuses under construction for three separate hyperscalers. Management also said it now expects to hit its $1 billion NOI run-rate a year from now, three years ahead of the original schedule.
Bull case: Applied Digital already has approved-vendor status with hyperscalers, a repeatable build template, and a project-finance model that funded Polaris Forge 2 with $2.15B of 6.750% senior secured notes due 2031. Each new campus stamps out familiar economics against investment-grade tenants.
Risk: Leverage is heavy at roughly $2.7 billion of total debt, and the GAAP net loss attributable to common shareholders widened to $100.9M. Customer concentration on CoreWeave remains a single-tenant fragility until Polaris Forge 2 delivers.
IREN: NVIDIA Exemplar Status and a $4B ARR Backlog
IREN (NASDAQ:IREN) is furthest along on the “own the entire stack” version of the pivot, running data centers, GPUs, and, through its Mirantis acquisition, a managed-services layer. Market cap is roughly $17.88 billion, and shares traded around $45.69 on Sept. 10, up nearly 36% over the past year and 7.01% YTD.
Fiscal Q4 revenue was $137.2 million, down 26.75% YoY, dragged by the deliberate decommissioning of mining hardware, which produced a $450.4 million non-cash impairment and a $684 million GAAP net loss. The relevant number for the pivot: AI Cloud Services revenue was $70.5 million, more than doubling sequentially, and full-year AI Cloud grew roughly 8x to $128.8 million. Bitcoin mining is expected to be effectively decommissioned by the end of December 2026.
On the August call, co-CEO Daniel Roberts said “$4 billion of ARR is now contracted for our 2026 capacity. And 1 billion of that is operating today.” Anchor commitments include a $3.4B five-year AI Cloud contract with NVIDIA, up to $2.1B of NVIDIA investment tied to deployment of 600,000 GPUs, and the delivery of Horizon 1, a 50 MW liquid-cooled deployment for Microsoft at Childress, which achieved NVIDIA Exemplar Cloud status on GB300 NVL72. Pricing is inflecting: management said recent three-year contracts are pricing in excess of $20 million per megawatt of IT load, with active discussions around $25 million per megawatt.
Bull case: IREN has combined pre-permitted power, investment-grade tenants, and a financing flywheel that included $6.5 billion of GPU financing in the past three months, plus a $2.4 billion AI factory financing led by Blue Owl-managed funds.
Risk: Fiscal 2027 capex guidance sits at approximately $25 to $30 billion. Meaningful revenue from Horizons 2 through 4 lands predominantly in the March quarter, so any construction slippage moves the entire ramp.
TeraWulf: Anthropic’s 20-Year Anchor in Kentucky
TeraWulf (NASDAQ:WULF) has moved the fastest from Bitcoin cash flows into hyperscale AI leases. Market cap is roughly $8.55 billion. Shares traded around $17.01 on Sept. 10, up 61.23% over the past year and 33.52% YTD.
Q2 revenue was $44.77 million, down 6.02% YoY, missing consensus, but the mix tells the story: HPC leasing generated $31.93M, up from zero a year earlier, and now represents approximately 71% of total revenue. The GAAP net loss of $939.92M was driven almost entirely by a $755.67 million non-cash charge from warrant fair-value changes, which management said had no liquidity impact.
The centerpiece contract is a 20-year lease with Anthropic for 401 MW at the Justified Data Campus in Kentucky, representing roughly $19 billion of contracted revenue over the initial term, with potential to grow to $33 billion with extensions. Delivery of CB-3 at Lake Mariner unlocked $600M of Google credit support for Fluidstack lease obligations. The company also acquired the Muskie Data Campus with up to 1 GW of contracted electric service from Kentucky Power. Total contracted revenue across the platform now exceeds $27 billion, with total platform capacity of 2.3 GW critical IT.
Bull case: TeraWulf holds a signed, investment-grade-credit-supported anchor lease, a repeatable playbook it calls a Lake Mariner clone, and is recycling capital via the $530M sale of 50.1% of the Abernathy JV to fund the higher-return, wholly controlled sites.
Risk: Anthropic revenue does not begin until initial delivery in H2 2027 with full delivery in early 2028, and Muskie initial service is not expected until Q4 2028. That is a long bridge to cross, funded through warrant-heavy capital structures and continued debt issuance.
What to Take Away
The pivot is real, but it is unevenly complete: WULF’s HPC leasing is already the majority of revenue, APLD’s HPC segment is scaling behind a single anchor tenant, and IREN just took a $684 million impairment to make room for GPUs. All three own something scarcer than chips right now, which is contracted power at delivered sites (we mapped seven other companies supplying the AI buildout beyond the chipmakers in a free report on the picks-and-shovels side of the boom). Balance sheets, warrant liabilities, and back-end-loaded revenue ramps make each one speculative and appropriate only for a small, size-controlled allocation within an AI infrastructure basket. The next catalysts to track are Horizons 2 through 4 at IREN, CB-4 commissioning at TeraWulf and Polaris Forge 2 delivery at Applied Digital.
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