The economics of crypto mining are changing. In particular, rising costs for electricity and the calculated hash rates for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin reduce the profitability of mining.
As a result, crypto mining companies are moving towards AI. why? First of all, AI training may provide a safer and more consistent revenue stream than the volatile crypto industry.
Why Crypto and AI Companies Offer the Best Returns on Wall Street
Crypto Market’s inherent volatility makes it impossible to predict revenue.
In contrast, AI data centers provide recurring revenue. This has a high growth rate and consistently high profit margins.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s 2024 Harving Cut Mining reward. This has led mining companies to reevaluate their business models.
sponsor
sponsor
Economics is now persuasive. AI data centers offer dramatically better returns on the same infrastructure. They can generate up to 25 times more revenue per kilowatt-hour than traditional crypto mining operations.
Crypto mining companies are also in a strong position to profit from the demand for AI.
Power Contracts, Data Center Locations, Low-Cost Power Contracts – There are powerful recipes to meet today’s AI needs.
More importantly, by moving towards servicing AI needs, crypto mining companies can benefit from a higher market rating as their AI stories unfold.
Numerous former Bitcoin mining companies are beginning to reuse their infrastructure in AI data centers, turning GPU-rich, power-intensive setups into rental computing farms for training, inference and high-performance computing.
As these companies move from Bitcoin or broader crypto play to AI, they are also being treated as AI play. As a result, their stocks are seeing higher stock prices and valuations.
There are dozens of opportunities in today’s space, and as data centers continue to be built globally, there are more opportunities, and many companies look attractive as small-cap opportunities amid today’s AI buildouts.
Hive Digital Technology (Hive)
Hive Digital Technologies has shifted to dual play on Crypto and AI infrastructure as pure crypto play.
The company has performed an impressive strategic pivot that evolves from Bitcoin mining to high-performance computing.
sponsor
sponsor
It aims to run $100 million using NVIDIA AI chips.
This transformation leverages existing infrastructure while leveraging the higher margin AI market.
Hive’s Bitcoin mining capacity rose at 10.4 eh/s by May 2025, at 58% per month, with plans to reach 25 EH/s by the second half of 2025.
The company’s commitment to renewable energy businesses in Canada, Sweden and Paraguay is positioned favorably around the world.
Hive’s AI expansion includes strategic investments in NVIDIA GPU clusters, and the business is expected to expand significantly.
Hive is the leader in FirstMovers’ advantage in the transition from mining to AA. It holds important infrastructure such as cheap power supplies and data centers.
“The lesson here is that Bitcoin miners were a stepping stone for the AI business. They were stuck, wasted, and surplus electricity went nowhere. Bitcoin miners went, they found a way to extract that energy and then create something economical. That’s really important.
Additionally, as of August 2025, Hive boasts a substantial financial holding of 2,201 BTC (valued at $251.73 million), allowing it to benefit from the rise of Bitcoin without the economy of mining.
Core Scientific (Corz)
sponsor
sponsor
Core Scientific is another company moving from cryptocurrency mining to AI data center infrastructure.
The company expects a “relatively equal split” between Crypto Mining and AI in 2025, representing “a fundamental shift from the high-volatility Bitcoin mining space moving into data centers.”
In the meantime, CoreWeave has a decisive agreement to acquire Core Scientific in all share transactions, which are valued significantly higher than the $5.2 billion market capitalized shares at the end of September.
Specifically, Core Science shareholders will receive 0.1235 shares of CoreWeave Class A common stock in each share, and are expected to close by the end of 2025.
The transformation of Core Scientific is evident in major expansion projects, including CoreWeave, which supports AI and high-performance cloud computing, including a $1.2 billion expansion of its data center in Denton, Texas.
Additionally, the company is planning a new AI data center in Georgia, with the first facility opening by July 2026.
The acquisition has proven to be beneficial to investors, with over $500 million annual operational and lease payment savings by the end of 2027.
This vertical integration eliminates previously created core waves for core science, scientifically, while ensuring critical infrastructure capabilities.
As demand for AI data centers continues to increase dramatically, once the merger is complete, it will help increase valuations.
sponsor
sponsor
Core Scientific’s established infrastructure, strategic partnerships and pending acquisitions by leading AI cloud providers will be beneficial with trillions of dollars of AI infrastructure buildout, exposing investors to this transformative technological change.
Ren Limited (Airen)
Iren Limited has gained momentum in stock over the past few weeks. Its stock has skyrocketed since it ran a strategic pivot from Bitcoin mining to the AI-Reaid data center.
The company uniquely combines margin-based Bitcoin mining with a strategic shift towards green AI data centers.
So far, this has produced 128% year-over-year growth supported by ultra-low energy costs (3.3¢/kWh), which offers a significant competitive advantage over other mining versus AI plays.
Transformation is already producing significant returns. Iren’s AI Cloud Services has deployed 1,896 AI-enabled GPUs (including the NVIDIA H100/H200), generating $26 million in annual revenue.
However, Real Growth Catalyst has brought about a massive $674 million investment in Iren’s 12,400 new GPUs, doubling its AI cloud capacity to 23,000 units.
Iren’s flagship development, Horizon 1 Facility, is a $300 million-$350 million project designed to support 200 kW per rack via direct chip cooling to host Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.
Beyond this, the Aylen sweetwater facility represents the 2GW flagship AI & computing hub with capacity of over 700,000 liquid-cooled Blackwell GPUs.
Currently, stocks have grown by around 300% in 2025 and 400% over the past 12 months.
However, since the AI data center story is toast for investors in the stock market today, Aylen is another crypto mining play with investors’ demand for AI’s hot stories.