Bitcoin mining stocks have been on a run in 2026, with Riot Platforms, Hut 8, Bitfarms, and Core Scientific posting some of the group’s biggest year-to-date gains, according to a CryptoQuant chart analyst Maartunn shared on X covering trading from January through July.

The move has less to do with mining Bitcoin itself and more to do with miners repositioning as power and data center suppliers for AI companies, reflecting a change in how the market is pricing these stocks.

The Chart Behind the Rally

Maartunn’s chart put Riot’s year-to-date gain at 83% through late July, with Hut 8 up 72%, Bitfarms up 50%, and Core Scientific up 31% over the same stretch.

“It’s a race for power, grid access, and AI-ready infrastructure,” Maartunn wrote, arguing the sector has moved past pure hashrate competition.

That framing lines up with what’s happened since. On August 11, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic agreed to pay Riot $9.1 billion over 20 years for 191 megawatts of computing capacity at its Rockdale, Texas site, enough to power roughly 143,000 homes.

Riot’s shares jumped 24% in after-hours trading on the news, even after closing the regular session down more than 5% and posting a $237 million quarterly loss.

IREN, another miner chasing the same trend, climbed close to 10% this week after landing a $3.4 billion cloud contract with Nvidia, part of its own shift from mining into AI cloud services. Maartunn’s numbers only run through late July, though, while the market data available this week runs through August 12, and the two datasets don’t line up perfectly.

By that more recent close, Riot’s year-to-date gain had settled near 60%, still strong but down from the 83% cited in the July chart, with shares trading around $20. Hut 8 pushed further to a roughly 98% gain, near $91 a share. Core Scientific extended its climb too, up 43% year-to-date and trading near $21.

Others showed more modest upticks, including CleanSpark, which, at the time of writing, was around $12, up 20% this year, and IREN, whose shares were trading near $44, a 16% jump since the start of the year. MARA, the largest publicly traded miner, was about $10, with a much smaller 7% YTD gain.

But not everyone in the sector is celebrating, as data from Yahoo Finance shows Bitdeer, Argo Blockchain, and Canaan are down about 20%, 24%, and 71% in the same period when their counterparts printed green.

Where the Money for This Is Coming From

MARA’s results show why miners are looking elsewhere. In its August 6 shareholder letter, the company reported Q2 revenue of $174.9 million, down 27% year over year, and a $611.3 million net loss. It also sold 2,213 BTC during the quarter while continuing to invest in new infrastructure.

But that does not mean mining is disappearing, with analyst Shanaka Anslem Perera noting on July 6 that the network absorbed a large miner exit after public firms, including MARA, CleanSpark, Riot, Cango, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer, sold more than 32,000 BTC in the first quarter of 2026 and put that money into AI contracts worth an estimated $70 billion industry-wide.

The pivot briefly knocked Bitcoin’s network hash rate down about 4%, the first drop in six years, before difficulty adjustments restored profitability and the network kept producing blocks on schedule.

Source: CryptoPotato