Over the past year, the Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI) surged ninety-seven percent, even though bitcoin itself lost forty-six percent of its value during the same period. This decoupling was driven by mining companies pivoting to provide infrastructure for artificial intelligence. Major players such as Riot Platforms, Core Scientific, and IREN signed multi-billion-dollar data center lease agreements with tech giants like NVIDIA, AMD, and Microsoft.

Rising costs have made traditional cryptocurrency mining less profitable, with Riot’s cost to mine a single bitcoin reaching seventy percent of its value. Meanwhile, long-term power lease agreements—such as Core Scientific’s fifteen-year, fourteen-billion-dollar contract with AMD or IREN’s five-year deal with NVIDIA—have fundamentally altered the business model of miners, turning them into computing power landlords.

Experts note that WGMI’s performance now depends more on tech giants’ AI capital expenditures than on cryptocurrency prices. Investors seeking direct exposure to bitcoin are advised to use spot ETFs like the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), as mining funds have effectively ceased to serve as simple proxies for the crypto market.