In our previous article, we followed a payment into a block and made one claim: the energy spent on Bitcoin mining is not waste, it is the security budget of a monetary network. That still leaves the obvious question. Who is actually spending it?
An industry with addresses
The answer is not teenagers in basements. The machines belong overwhelmingly to companies with names, tickers and earnings calls. The United States hosts around 38% of global mining capacity1, and firms such as MARA Holdings, Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, Cipher Mining, IREN and TeraWulf trade on public markets. They build large-scale data centres, negotiate long-term power contracts, deploy specialised hardware and publish audited accounts.
The most useful way to think about them is this: bitcoin miners are energy companies that get paid in bitcoin. Their revenue is denominated in bitcoin; their costs are denominated in electricity. That cost structure also makes them unusual partners for power grids. Because mining can switch off in seconds without damage, miners in Texas routinely curtail operations during demand peaks, returning power to the grid when households need it most.
The number the sector lives by
Every commodity industry has one price that governs its fortunes. For oil drillers it is the barrel. For miners it is hashprice, the daily revenue earned per unit of computing power. In July 2026 it sits near multi-year lows, around $30 per petahash per day.2 That is uncomfortable for the sector, and it is precisely what makes it legible to a financial audience: a falling hashprice does not hurt all miners equally. Operators with cheap power and efficient machines keep a margin; the inefficient switch off. As in any commodity industry, position on the cost curve decides who survives.
Infrastructure worth more than bitcoin
The strongest evidence that miners built something real is that the world’s largest technology companies are now renting it. A mining site is land, grid connections, gigawatts of contracted power and industrial cooling: exactly what the AI economy needs and cannot build fast enough. Over the past two years, listed miners have signed 17 AI and high-performance computing deals worth more than $110B, contracting around 6 GW of power to AI hyperscalers.3 TeraWulf signed a 20-year lease worth around $19B with AI developer Anthropic in July 2026;4 IREN a $9.7B agreement to supply AI cloud capacity to Microsoft;5 Cipher Mining a roughly $5.5B, 15-year lease with Amazon Web Services.6
This does not mean miners are abandoning bitcoin. It means the infrastructure built to mine it has found a second customer, and the second customer is the one of the fastest-growing industries in the world.
What this means for financial professionals
Strip away the crypto vocabulary and a familiar picture emerges: an energy-intensive industrial sector with a commodity-style cost curve, real assets, real counterparties and a growing second line of business. It can be analysed the way advisers already analyse any equity sector, through costs, margins, capital discipline and customers.
Bitcoin mining began as the answer to a cryptographic problem. Seventeen years on, it is also a real economy of companies, jobs, power plants and data centres. The machines guessing numbers in part 1 turn out to have landlords, lenders and shareholders. That is worth understanding before the sector appears in a portfolio near you.
Sources
1 Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Bitcoin Mining Map.
2 Hashrate Index, July 2026
3 Bernstein analysis, reported by Decrypt, June 2026: 17 deals worth over $110B signed by bitcoin miners with AI hyperscalers over two years, totalling ~6 GW of contracted power.
4 CoinDesk, 6 July 2026: TeraWulf 20-year, ~$19B AI data-centre lease with Anthropic
5 Bloomberg / CoinDesk, 3 November 2025: Microsoft signs $9.7B AI cloud deal with IREN.
6 CoinDesk, 3 November 2025: Cipher Mining ~$5.5B, 15-year AWS agreement