Public Bitcoin miners are spending billions to pursue artificial intelligence and high-performance computing revenue, but returns have not kept pace with the scale of investment. BlocksBridge Consulting said in its latest Miner Weekly newsletter that a group of 15 Bitcoin miners and AI data-center companies spent a combined $30.7 billion on capital assets in their latest 2026 reporting periods, which is already 42.6% more than the $21.53 billion they spent throughout 2025. According to Cointelegraph, the figures highlight how expensive it is for miners to diversify beyond Bitcoin mining and build businesses around AI and HPC infrastructure. Among Bitcoin miners specifically, the gap remains wide: nine comparable miners spent $5.11 billion on capital assets during the first half of 2026 while reporting just $341.2 million in directly disclosed AI and HPC revenue, a roughly 15-to-1 capex-to-revenue ratio. BlocksBridge said its capital spending estimate is based on cash purchases and allocations to hardware, property, equipment and other productive assets, after accounting for proceeds and refunds from asset sales.

Despite the spending gap, AI and HPC revenue is rising. The nine miners generated $205.8 million from those businesses in the second quarter, up 52% quarter-on-quarter, with Core Scientific, TeraWulf and Bitdeer among the companies reporting gains. BlocksBridge said power contracts and available land may give miners an initial advantage, but turning those assets into AI-ready capacity still requires substations, buildings, cooling systems, networking equipment and, in some business models, GPUs. It remains unclear whether Bitcoin’s latest price recovery will ease pressure on companies that still operate sizable mining businesses. Bitcoin has surged more than 13% this week and climbed back above $72,000 after the US Treasury said it would at least double the maximum size of its long-term bond buybacks to $4 billion per operation, a move aimed at improving liquidity in the Treasury market that initially pushed yields lower and boosted risk appetite. In another sign of the shift toward AI and HPC, CoinShares announced a strategy change for its industry tracking exchange-traded fund this week. The fund, now branded the CoinShares Bitcoin Mining and Digital Power ETF (WGMI), has $222.4 million in assets under management and now includes 29 holdings across bitcoin miners, data center operators, AI semiconductors, power generation and HPC, which CoinShares describes as businesses powering the digital economy.