Bitcoin Magazine
VanEck: Bitcoin Miners Face $50B Funding Gap as AI Pivot Separates Winners From Losers
A new framework from asset manager VanEck is drawing clear lines between Bitcoin miners that are genuinely transforming into artificial intelligence infrastructure providers and those that are still selling a story. All of it comes with a sobering price tag: a roughly $50 billion near-term funding gap standing between the sector’s pipeline ambitions and actual delivery.
In a research note, VanEck investment analyst Griffin MacMaster and Head of Digital Assets Research Matthew Sigel laid out what they describe as the first structured valuation approach for the increasingly blurry category of companies that straddle both Bitcoin mining and AI data center hosting.
With financial disclosures varying widely across the sector and cash flows still nascent, VanEck argues the cleanest metric available to investors right now is gross energized power — essentially, how many megawatts a company has actually switched on, not just announced.
The gap between those two things is already telling. Companies that have physical leases in hand — including Cipher Mining (CIFR), Hut 8 (HUT), and TeraWulf (WULF) — are commanding valuations above 10x gross energized power.
Meanwhile, names like Marathon Digital (MARA) and CleanSpark (CLSK), which remain more closely tied to Bitcoin mining with limited contracted AI capacity, are trading at just 2–6x that same metric.
“For now, we find that the market is paying for contracted and energized capacity, while discounting everything still in the pipeline,” the analysts wrote.
Signing contracts, VanEck warns, is only the beginning. Across the entire peer group, miners have delivered only approximately 25% of their leased capacity — a figure that the firm expects to decline further before improving, as large-scale construction projects kick off in 2027 and 2028.
That execution gap is expected to become the dominant valuation driver going forward, with companies that miss construction milestones risking what VanEck calls “structural de-ratings.”
The analysts also flag that very few of these companies have any prior experience building out the kind of infrastructure AI customers require — making project management credentials as important as megawatt counts.
VanEck’s deal tracker signals a busy second half of 2026, with multiple companies — including Bitdeer (BTDR), HIVE Digital (HIVE), Riot Platforms (RIOT), and Core Scientific (CORZ) — in various stages of active or advanced lease negotiations. WULF is described as in “advanced negotiations” on a 480MW site in Kentucky, expected to land a customer in the second quarter.
A $221 billion build — and who can pay for it
The capital demands of this pivot are staggering. VanEck estimates the sector’s long-term capital expenditure needs approach $221 billion, with near-term needs alone creating a collective fun