Bitcoin miners retreat sharply as BTC pulls back from recent highs

Publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies had a tough week, with nearly every major miner posting double-digit declines as the sector sharply underperformed Bitcoin itself.

Over the past five trading days, names like Cipher, Applied Digital, Core Scientific, CleanSpark and Bitdeer slid between 23% and 52%, while other operators such as Riot and Hut 8 saw mid-teens losses.

Bitcoin (BTC) was trading about $94,400 at the time of writing, down about 9% over the past seven days.

Source: Bitcoin Mining Stocks

Zooming out, a Miner Mag report on Thursday showed public mining stocks have shed over $20 billion in market value in the past month, dropping about 25% since mid-October and sharply underperforming Bitcoin’s decline.

The decline came even as institutions such as Jane Street, Fidelity and Barclays have increased their positions across several major miners.

Despite recent losses, some mining companies have outperformed Bitcoin on a year-to-date basis.

IREN, the largest public Bitcoin miner by market capitalization, is up roughly 370% year-to-date, while Cipher Mining has gained about 210%. By comparison, Bitcoin itself is only up around 1.5% over the same period, according to TradingView.

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Bitcoin miners turn to AI and HPC

Despite strong year-to-date gains for several Bitcoin mining stocks, mining remains an increasingly challenging business. With halvings cutting block rewards roughly every four years, several miners have adopted new strategies to diversify their income, while others are exiting altogether.

The biggest shift has been toward AI and high-performance computing (HPC), as miners repurpose their power-heavy data centers for steadier, higher-margin workloads. With existing infrastructure already optimized for energy and cooling, many miners now see HPC integration as an essential part of their business

On Friday, Bitfarms’ stock dropped sharply after the company said it would wind down its Bitcoin mining operations over the next two years, starting with the closure of its 18-megawatt site in Washington, as it plans to convert its facilities into AI and HPC data centers.

Other miners are opting for a hybrid approach rather than exiting Bitcoin mining entirely. In June, Core Scientific signed a $3.5 billion agreement with AI cloud provider CoreWeave to supply 200 megawatts of hosting capacity for HPC workloads.

In October, CleanSpark’s shares jumped roughly 13% in a single day after the miner announced its first move into AI, and in early November, IREN signed a five-year, $9.7 billion deal to provide Microsoft with access to Nvidia GPUs hosted in its data centers.

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