VanEck Reveals Bitcoin Miners Are ’Sitting on a Gold Mine’ as AI Data Center Demand Skyrockets
Investment giant VanEck issued a stark assessment on March 13, 2026, revealing that Bitcoin miners possess massively undervalued power infrastructure assets poised to capitalize on two simultaneous capital-intensive megatrends: the relentless expansion of Bitcoin's hash rate and the explosive, insatiable demand for AI data center capacity.
Source: CNBC
The market has not caught up to that yet. That is the trade.
Why Bitcoin Miners With Megawatts Already Win
Building a new data center from scratch means waiting in grid interconnection queues that stretch to 2028 and beyond. Bitcoin miners already skipped that line.
They have the land. The power contracts. The cooling systems. The grid relationships. That is years of lead time already locked in.
Sigel pointed out that miners still trade at a massive discount to data center peers on a market-cap-per-megawatt basis. The market is either ignoring AI demand entirely or betting miners cannot execute. Industry numbers suggest execution is already happening. Public miners are targeting a jump from 7 GW today to 20 GW by 2027.
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Bitcoin miners trade at a deep discount to data centers despite pivoting to power AI infrastructure, with their stocks poised for more gains, VanEck's Matthew Sigel told CNBC. pic.twitter.com/f4OQAOTAXP
There is also a grid services angle that most people overlook. Miners can cut their load on demand. That flexibility is becoming genuinely valuable as AI clusters and reshoring pile pressure onto domestic grids. Miners can simply switch off when the grid needs power. Nobody loses electricity. Miners just lose a little revenue. That is now a sellable service.
AI data center demand is growing at 24% annually through 2030. For miners holding the right infrastructure, that is not just a tailwind. That is a full repricing event waiting to happen.
What the AI Pivot Means for Listed Mining Stocks
The deals are not hypothetical anymore.
MARA is converting mining sites into hyperscale data center campuses. Core Scientific just locked in up to $1 billion in financing from Morgan Stanley to fund its AI pivot.
CleanSpark said it plainly in Q1 2026. Bitcoin mining investments do not make sense at current hash prices compared to AI returns.
Hash rate is already feeling it. Global miner hash rate dropped 6% from its November 2025 peak. Some of that is rigs being reallocated to AI workloads. Not enough to threaten network security yet, but worth watching.
On the other side, Bitdeer is deploying 50,000 proprietary ASICs across 413 MW. That alone could add 33 EH/s to the network and $335 million in additional BTC revenue at current prices.
Q1 2026 earnings will be the first real test. Watch power capacity numbers, AI contract announcements, and curtailment revenue. The valuation gap Sigel flagged either starts closing this cycle or becomes very hard to justify.
