AI Pivot Crowns 2025’s Mining Kings; IREN & Cipher Soar >200% While Bitdeer Stumbles
IREN and Cipher Mining posted >200% returns in 2025 fueled by multi-billion dollar AI contracts, while Bitdeer plunged 50% on chip delays and widening losses.
The Great Divergence
The correlation trade is dead. Throughout 2025, Bitcoin mining stocks decoupled from spot BTC price action, splitting into two distinct asset classes: AI infrastructure plays and pure-play legacy miners. The market voted with its capital, rewarding energy capacity over hashrate.
IREN (formerly Iris Energy) led the breakout, delivering a massive >300% YTD return. The catalyst wasn’t a Bitcoin rally, but a strategic re-rating as high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. Investors chased the revenue stability of its $9.7 billion contract with Microsoft, effectively treating the stock as a leveraged play on GPU cloud demand rather than block rewards.
The Multi-Billion Dollar Pivot
Cipher Mining (CIFR) followed the same playbook to a +230% gain. In November, the company cemented its transition with a $9 billion colocation deal with Fluidstack. Crucially, the deal includes a financial backstop from Google, signaling institutional validation that pure-play miners rarely achieve. The agreement locks in 300 MW of capacity at its Barber Lake site, converting volatile crypto revenue into fixed, investment-grade cash flow.
Hut 8 (HUT) joined the winners’ circle (+139%) after signing a $7 billion lease for its River Bend campus. The 15-year agreement, also backed by Google, repurposes 245 MW of power capacity for AI workloads. The market reaction was immediate: capital fled operators exposed to difficulty adjustments and flocked to those owning the power plugs for Silicon Valley.
The Cost of Execution Failure
While infrastructure plays soared, Bitdeer (BTDR) collapsed, ending the year down ~50%. The stock was punished for operational missteps, specifically the significant delay of its proprietary SEAL04 ASIC chip.
The financials painted a grim picture of pure-play risks. Bitdeer reported a Q3 net loss of $266.7 million, widening sharply from a $50.1 million loss the prior year. While its competitors announced cloud partnerships, Bitdeer struggled with R&D bottlenecks, forcing investors to re-evaluate the risk premium of vertically integrated mining hardware development.
“The market clearly favored certain types of companies… nearly all miners operating as pure Bitcoin plays posted negative YTD performance,” Cindy Feng, BitcoinMiningStock.io
The trend for 2026 is set. Power capacity is the new scarcity, and the market is no longer pricing these stocks on Exahash, but on Megawatts contracted to hyperscalers.
