Bitcoin Miners Didn't Bring AI Compute. They Brought Grid-Connected Megawatts.

Eight former bitcoin miners now lease data center capacity to AI tenants: Core Scientific, Applied Digital, Galaxy, TeraWulf, Cipher Digital, Riot Platforms, Hut 8 and CleanSpark. As of August 21, 2026, their filings put roughly 5.7 gigawatts under contract, measured in critical IT load with one caveat explained below, and about 870 megawatts delivered and billing. The remainder has a construction schedule attached.

None of it came from the mining computers. Bitcoin is mined on SHA-256 ASICs, chips built to run one hash function and nothing else; they have no AI application, and when a site converts, they are written down or sold. What carried over was the power estate: land, substations, transformers, interconnection rights, utility relationships, and years of experience operating very large loads that can be switched off on command. Applied Digital describes "the interconnection rights necessary to energize high-density compute at scale" (FY2026 10-K); CleanSpark's chief financial officer calls its sites "a portfolio of scarce, grid-connected power assets" (8-K, July 14, 2026). The contracted figures are real, the live figures are real, and the distance between them is the time it takes to build a data hall on a site whose electrical connection already exists.

Before counting megawatts, define the megawatt

Gross power is not critical IT load. Gross is the utility capacity at the fence; critical IT is what the racks can draw once cooling, distribution losses, and redundancy have taken their share, and it governs how an operator manages a supercomputer's power envelope. Cipher's Black Pearl lease is 300 MW gross, and 216 MW critical IT; Galaxy's Helios Phase I is 200 MW gross and 133 MW critical IT. Those two disclosed ratios run 0.66 to 0.72.

Operational is not contracted, and contracted is not pipeline. A lease is a legal state, an energized hall is a physical one, and a load request filed with a grid operator is neither.

Base term is not extension-inclusive value. Riot's frontier-lab lease is $9.1 billion over its initial 20 years and $16.1 billion if both five-year options are exercised. The landlord has granted those options, and the tenant has not committed to exercising them, so both figures accurately describe different things.

Then the cohort's own units. Core Scientific reports "leased customer power capacity," which it defines as committed non-redundant customer IT load; Hut 8 reports IT megawatts alongside "utility capacity"; Cipher quotes gross at the portfolio level and critical IT per lease; the other five report critical IT. Every one of these companies disclosed correctly in its own terms, but the terms do not match, and an aggregate that adds them without saying so measures four quantities with one number.

The cohort, normalized

Unit is critical IT unless the cell says otherwise; "live" uses each company's own verb, and revenue is the company-stated contracted amount over the initial term.

Seven of the eight report contracted capacity in critical IT, and together they hold 4,594 MW. Core Scientific's 1,119 MW of leased customer power is comparable in kind but not in label; adding it gives about 5.7 GW, with that caveat stated. Disclosed live capacity is 872 MW, plus a first Black Pearl tranche whose size Cipher has not published: roughly one megawatt billing for every 6.5 under contract. Disclosed base-term revenue across the eight comes to about $134 billion. Bernstein analysts, as reported by The Block on July 15, 2026, count 7 GW across 19 miner-related deals worth more than $135 billion; their set is wider than these eight, so it corroborates.

The ladder

Every megawatt figure a company publishes sits on one rung of the same ladder. The rungs below are the convention this publication will use for the sector; the examples come from the cohort's Q2 2026 filings, with the filing's own verb.

Two company totals show why a single pipeline number misleads. Cipher describes "5.3 GW across 11 sites at various stages of interconnection." Decomposed, that is a first tranche on rung one, 454 MW of contracted critical IT on rung two, 477 MW of energized or approved mining-era interconnection on rung four, about 3.6 GW in or behind ERCOT's Batch Zero study on rung five, and 500 MW of optioned land on rung six. Hut 8's 8,660 MW "development pipeline" (Q2 2026 release) spreads the same way: 1,330 MW of utility capacity under construction, 50 MW under development, 1,880 MW under exclusivity, and 5,400 MW under diligence.

Neither company hides this; both publish the decomposition. The top-line number is what travels, though, and the rungs stay home. Cipher's August investor presentation states "907 MW of operating and contracted capacity today," footnoted as gross megawatts for executed HPC leases plus currently operating bitcoin self-mining (8-K, August 4, 2026, EX-99.2). The label, not the number, drops off in secondary citation.

Concurring in FERC's June 18 show-cause orders on large-load interconnection (Docket EL26-68-000), Commissioner David Rosner wrote that speculative requests "clog up load interconnection queues, divert resources, and distort forecasts," and modeling projects that never materialize leads "to double counting." It is the same tangle of speculative requests and committed projects this publication described in the 100-gigawatt pipeline in March, and a rung-five figure read as rung one is the same error.

Galaxy, audited

Galaxy's Helios campus in Dickens County, Texas, is the clearest single record of what transfers in a conversion and what does not.

Argo Blockchain's FY2022 annual report described its March 2021 purchase as "a strategically-located piece of land with a secured interconnection agreement with the Texas grid for up to 800 MW of electricity" (Form 20-F). Argo paid roughly $5 million in stock and sold the site to Galaxy in December 2022 for $65 million. Galaxy's FY2025 10-K describes "the full 800 MW of high-voltage capacity for which we are already fully approved from ERCOT" (10-K). CoreWeave's three Helios leases total 800 MW gross. The interconnection Argo secured in 2021 is the interconnection CoreWeave is leasing in 2026.

In Galaxy's Q2 2026 10-Q, mining equipment is carried at $79.25 million as of both December 31, 2025 and June 30, 2026, with accumulated impairment of $88.2 million that is identical at both dates; the write-down happened in 2025. The FY2025 MD&A records an "$87.3 million impairment of mining equipment and related infrastructure and $12.3 million of disposals of mining equipment net carrying value associated with the data center conversion." Data center infrastructure rose from $67.7 million to $1.70 billion between the two balance-sheet dates, but that is not $1.6 billion of fresh spend in six months: construction in progress fell from $1.34 billion to $512 million over the same period, and the footnote says infrastructure assets were moved into WIP during 2025 "as they are undergoing enhancements." Much of the jump is reclassification back out.

So the mining compute was impaired, partly disposed of, and displaced; the halls were rebuilt; the substation, the transformers, and the ERCOT approval were kept. Cipher's February notes deck says the same of Black Pearl: "~85% of the infrastructure currently deployed at Black Pearl is expected to be utilized for the AWS project" (8-K EX-99.1). The electrical yard transfers; the hall is gutted and the mining hardware leaves the books.

CoreWeave is the counterexample that defines the category

CoreWeave came out of crypto mining and now runs AI compute. By its own account, the company mined its first block on the Ethereum network in 2016, and "one GPU turned into hundreds, then tens of thousands via strategic acquisitions of distressed hardware during the 'crypto-winter' of 2018/2019." It bought a rendering platform in 2019 and says it "leveraged our expertise in running NVIDIA GPUs" to build a cloud; its FY2025 10-K dates to 2020. Ethereum was mined on general-purpose GPUs and a render farm runs on the same parts, so the reasonable reading is that the mining fleet became the first cloud; the 10-K says only that the "crypto mining offerings" were discontinued. None of it had anything to do with bitcoin.

Two other miners separated the businesses outright. Crusoe sold its bitcoin mining operation to NYDIG in March 2025; Northern Data sold its Peak Mining subsidiary in November 2025 before Rumble closed its acquisition of the remainder in June 2026. Those are corporate separations of two asset classes, and they say nothing about either's value.

Why the footprint is the asset

Interconnection timelines have grown longer than AI training roadmaps, contracted megawatts have become the buildout's scarcest input, and accelerators ship faster than the grid can absorb them. ERCOT said on June 18, 2026, that it is tracking more than 438,000 MW of large-load requests, nearly 89 percent from data centers (ERCOT release). The same day, FERC sent show-cause orders to all six regional grid operators it regulates, a process this publication has covered.

There are several ways to compress time to power. Generation behind the meter is one, and the turbine order book runs years deep; in Texas, a co-located net-metering arrangement still requires an ERCOT study and commission approval, so it shortens the path without leaving the process (ERCOT). Splitting one training job across buildings that energize at different times is another. The most valuable is starting from an existing electrical footprint rather than virgin land and a fresh request.

In July 2025, CoreWeave agreed to acquire Core Scientific, its landlord, in an all-stock deal at 0.1235 CoreWeave shares per Core Scientific share. At the October 30 special meeting, 20,752,327 shares voted for and 203,451,498 against, and the agreement was terminated the same day. The filings record the rejection.

A 20-year lease signed in 2026 takes that interconnection away from any other claimant until the late 2040s, including scientific supercomputing, and the tenants are the same buyers already pre-purchasing capacity at every layer of the stack.

The rule

Count megawatts by legal and physical state, not by the noun in a press release. The dates on which the contracted column is scheduled to become the operating one are the numbers to track: Riot's first 96 MW to its frontier-lab tenant in December 2027, TeraWulf's Anthropic capacity from the second half of 2027, Hut 8's first River Bend hall in the second quarter of 2027, CleanSpark's first deliveries in the fourth quarter of 2027.