Crypto stocks rally thanks to rotation from AI infrastructure; bitcoin miners lag
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- Bitmine Immersion surged 11%, the top gainer in crypto stocks Monday, after the ether accumulator added roughly 10,000 ETH (~$19.4 million) to its holdings.
- Strategy rose 7% after adding to its cash buffer for a fifth straight week instead of buying bitcoin, while Sharplink Gaming jumped 6%, and Coinbase Global, BitGo and Figure Technology gained 4–6%.
- Circle Internet Group added 2% after announcing it acquired IBM's portfolio of more than 1,000 blockchain-related patents worldwide, with financial terms undisclosed.
- The sector-wide crypto rally came alongside a sharp oil selloff, lower Treasury yields and continued risk-off positioning in memory chip and other direct AI plays, per ClearStreet analyst Owen Lau.
- AI-exposed bitcoin miners were uniformly in the red: Cipher Mining fell 8%, Hut 8 dropped 6%, Terawulf lost 4%, and Core Scientific — which has mostly pivoted from mining — slid 9%.
- Pure-play miners also sold off — Riot Platforms -5%, Mara Holdings -3%, CleanSpark -4% — because investors now value them as digital infrastructure owners (power, data centers, energy contracts), so they trade alongside AI-exposed peers through thematic baskets and ETFs.
- Nvidia's reported talks to financially back OpenAI's lease of a new Ohio AI data center underscored the growing role of credit in funding AI investment, raising dilution and debt concerns flagged by Compass Point's Michael Donovan.
- Bitcoin itself was little changed below $65,000, while ether rose more than 1% to about $1,900.
Why it matters: The 4–9% miner selloff alongside AI-infrastructure weakness shows investors are now pricing bitcoin miners as credit-exposed digital infrastructure plays rather than crypto pure-plays — a regime change that ties miners' equity to AI capex cycles and to fears of circular financing exposed by Nvidia's reported OpenAI support.
