Crypto stocks rally on rotation from AI infrastructure; bitcoin miners lag

An array of bitcoin mining units inside a container at a CleanSpark facility in College Park, Georgia, on April 22, 2022. Source: Elijah Nouvelage | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Crypto stocks were among the top gainers on Monday, even as the broader market declined and capital rotated away from chip and AI infrastructure names.

Key Movers

• Bitmine Immersion led the group, surging 11% after the ether accumulator increased its cryptocurrency holdings by nearly 10,000 coins — worth approximately $19.4 million at current prices — according to a Monday update.
• Sharplink Gaming, another ETH treasury firm, jumped 6%.
• Strategy, the bitcoin treasury pioneer, rose 7% after adding to its cash buffer for a fifth consecutive week rather than purchasing bitcoin.
• Coinbase Global, BitGo, and Figure Technology each gained between 4% and 6%.
• Circle Internet Group, the stablecoin issuer, rose 2% after announcing it had acquired IBM's portfolio of more than 1,000 blockchain-related patents worldwide. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Market Context

The sector-wide rally occurred amid a sharp sell-off in oil prices, lower Treasury yields, and a continued risk-off approach to memory chip stocks and other direct AI plays.

Chip and AI infrastructure stocks came under pressure as concerns over circular financing spread, alongside intensifying competition from Chinese semiconductor companies. The resulting risk repricing accelerated capital rotation into alternative themes, including crypto, said Owen Lau, analyst at ClearStreet.

AI-Exposed Bitcoin Miners Decline

Despite the broader crypto rally, AI-exposed bitcoin miners were uniformly in the red:

• Cipher Mining led the decline, falling 8%.
• Hut 8 dropped 6%.
• Terawulf fell 4%.
• Core Scientific, which has largely pivoted away from bitcoin mining, was down 9%.

Weakness extended even to pure-play bitcoin miners:

• Riot Platforms lost 5%.
• Mara Holdings sank 3%.
• CleanSpark was lower by 4%.

Analyst Commentary

Nvidia's reported discussions to provide financial support for OpenAI's plan to lease a new AI data center in Ohio underscored the growing role of credit in enabling AI investment, said Michael Donovan, senior research analyst at Compass Point.

"Today's weakness partly reflects concern around capex requirements and whether companies across the miner-to-AI group may need to raise incremental capital at higher costs to fund their development pipelines," Donovan told CNBC.

Most publicly traded bitcoin miners are increasingly valued by investors as owners of digital infrastructure — given their power capacity, data center assets, and energy contracts — rather than merely as producers of bitcoin. As a result, even pure-play miners like Mara Holdings and Riot Platforms can sell off alongside AI-exposed miners. These names often trade together through thematic baskets, sector ETFs, and algorithmic positioning that creates broad moves across the entire mining sector.

"Some investors are questioning whether credit appetite for these projects is approaching its limits and which developers can fund their pipelines without meaningful dilution, expensive debt, or additional support from customers and strategic partners," Donovan added. "That may create a near-term overhang for the group, even though we continue to view the base compute infrastructure segment of AI as attractive and structurally supply-constrained."

Bitcoin and Ether

Bitcoin itself was little changed, trading below the $65,000 level. Ether was higher by more than 1%, at approximately $1,900.

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