Public Bitcoin miners have announced more than $114bn of long-term artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) contracts. Roughly a quarter of the leased capacity has been built and switched on. About $44bn of that total was signed in the past six weeks across four leases. None of the four will generate a dollar of revenue before 2027.
Bitcoin Miners Have Signed $114bn of AI Leases and Built a Quarter of It
18 August 2026 - 17:08 UTC
By Yaёl Bizouati-Kennedy & Sandmark staff
The figure comes from a Sandmark review of filings and announcements since June 2024 covering TeraWulf (WULF), Hut 8 (HUT), Core Scientific (CORZ), IREN, Cipher Digital (CIFR), HIVE Digital and Applied Digital (APLD), among others. It measures potential revenue over the initial terms of the agreements, not sales already recognized. Terms run from five to 25 years. The market has already paid for the pivot. The capacity has not yet been built.
What the market is actually paying for
Investment management firm VanEck published a valuation framework for the sector on 16 Jun, written by investment analyst Griffin MacMaster and head of digital assets research Matthew Sigel. Its central finding is that investors are pricing contracted capacity as though it were delivered capacity.
Using gross energized power – megawatts (MW) of capacity actually switched on rather than merely announced – miners with leases in hand traded above 10 times that measure, against two to six times for those still marketing a pipeline. The first group was Cipher Digital, Hut 8 and TeraWulf. The second was Marathon Digital (MARA) and CleanSpark (CLSK). The data was as of 4 Jun. "Execution, not signing, becomes the next premium," the analysts wrote, warning that operators missing construction milestones risk a lasting drop in the multiple investors will pay for them.
Two details make that note more useful now than it was in June. VanEck put sector-wide delivery at about 25% of leased capacity and said the ratio would get worse before it improved, as large-scale construction starts in 2027 and 2028.
The deals arrived roughly on the schedule VanEck expected. So did the warning attached to them. VanEck states that it has exposure to Bitcoin and may hold positions in the companies it names.
Four leases, and nothing before 2027
TeraWulf said in a 6 Jul announcement that it had signed a 20-year agreement with Anthropic covering approximately 401 MW worth about $19bn over the initial term and up to $33bn with extensions. The company said on its second-quarter earnings call that initial capacity is not due online until the second half of 2027, with full build-out in early 2028.
Core Scientific said on its 28 Jul earnings call that its 15-year leases with AMD, covering roughly 530 MW across five sites, represent more than $14bn of a contracted pipeline exceeding $24bn. CEO Adam Sullivan told analysts initial capacity is expected in the first half of 2027, with roughly half the 530 MW due in 2027 and the balance by the end of 2028.
CleanSpark disclosed in a 14 Jul announcement a 20-year lease at its Sandersville, Georgia campus on triple-net terms, meaning the tenant covers tax, insurance and maintenance on top of rent, worth $6.6bn rising to $11.6bn with extensions, which does not begin delivering until the fourth quarter of calendar 2027. Bitdeer Technologies (BTDR) said on 4 Aug that its Tydal Data Center AS subsidiary had signed a 16-year, $4.7bn agreement. It is the fastest of the four to revenue, with a first phase due by the end of 2026, and still more than a year from full contribution.
Why the second wave is harder to build
The capacity generating revenue today was built against contracts signed well before this summer. The new deals are different. The operational gap between mining and AI hosting is wider than the shared phrase "data centre" suggests.
Mining is interruptible. Operators switch off when power prices spike, restart when they fall and tolerate modest uptime. An AI lease is the opposite: continuous high-density load, tight power-quality specifications, advanced cooling, redundant fibre and multi-year service-level agreements. Customers pay for guaranteed uptime, typically 99.99% or better, with financial penalties when the operator misses. They are not paying for the option to switch machines off when the grid is stressed.
"A mining site mainly asks when electricity is cheap enough to use. An AI data centre must be available when the customer needs it," Canaan (CAN) CEO Nangeng Zhang told Sandmark. Canaan's own AI and HPC pipeline remains in the investment stage.
Capital and time compound the risk. Alan Orwick, CEO of Dominant Strategies and co-founder of Quai Network, told Sandmark that an AI campus can absorb billions before the first rent cheque arrives.
The permits are getting harder, not easier
Alexandre Schmidt, equity index manager at CoinShares, told Sandmark that major US grids are reviewing permitting processes and, in some cases, imposing limits. On 14 Jul, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order creating a one-year statewide pause on new hyperscale data-centre permits above 50 MW, the first such statewide moratorium in the US, according to the governor's office.
Every one of the four leases assumes power, grid connection and permits arrive on schedule, in an environment where that assumption is getting less safe.
Who can afford to finish what they signed
None of this is financed for free. CoinShares' first-quarter 2026 mining report puts IREN at $3.7bn in convertible notes, TeraWulf at $5.7bn of total debt and Cipher at $1.7bn in senior secured notes. If a place in the grid connection queue or a hardware-compatibility miss pushes 2027 delivery into 2028, lenders do not grant a grace period for the wait.
The economics also vary far more than the headline contract values suggest. VanEck measured what recent deals earn each year against what they cost to build, before any financing, and found a range of roughly 12% to 32%. Almost all of that spread comes from construction cost rather than from what tenants pay, which is fairly consistent across deals. Converting an existing mining site costs about $3mn to $4mn per megawatt and sits at the top of the range. Building from scratch costs $10mn to $12mn per megawatt and returns closer to 12% to 15%. Three of the four new leases involve substantial new construction.
Tenant quality then decides the cost of funding it. VanEck estimates that a megawatt leased to a cloud provider rated investment grade, meaning credit agencies judge it a low risk of default, on a long lease with those triple-net terms, supports an effective cost of capital near 6% to 10%.
The network is already showing the cost
The conversion is visible on the Bitcoin network itself. Hashrate, the total computing power securing the network, has averaged about 903 exahashes per second (EH/s) over the first two weeks of August, against a peak near 1,085 EH/s in October 2025, a decline of roughly 17%.
Bitcoin mining gave these companies land, power contracts and experience running large electrical loads. Those are real advantages. They are not the same as the balance-sheet capacity, construction expertise or customer relationships needed to run institutional AI data centres, and they are not the same as revenue.
There is a smaller tell in the names. Bitfarms is now Keel Infrastructure (KEEL). Cipher Mining is now Cipher Digital. TeraWulf calls its mining arm WULF Compute. Companies do not usually rename themselves out of a business they expect to keep.
