Crypto stocks rally thanks to rotation from AI infrastructure; bitcoin miners lag

Crypto stocks were some of the top gainers Monday as the broader market sold off and capital rotated away from chip and AI infrastructure names.

Bitmine Immersion led the group, surging 11% after the ether accumulator increased its holdings of the cryptocurrency by nearly 10,000 coins worth about $19.4 million at current prices, according to a Monday update. Fellow ETH treasury firm Sharplink Gaming jumped 6%.

Bitcoin treasury pioneer Strategy was up 7% after it added to its cash buffer for a fifth straight week rather than buy bitcoin.

Coinbase Global, BitGo and Figure Technology were all up between 4% and 6%.

Stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Group gained 2% after announcing it has acquired IBM’s portfolio of more than 1,000 blockchain-related patents worldwide. It did not disclose details of the acquisition.

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

“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.

Chip and AI infrastructure stocks were under pressure as concern over circular financing spread, along with 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 were uniformly in the red.

Cipher Mining led the group with an 8% decline. Hut 8 and Terawulf fell 6% and 4%, respectively. The weakness even extended to pure play bitcoin miners. Riot Platforms lost 5%, Mara Holdings sank 3% and CleanSpark was lower by 4%. Core Scientific, which has mostly pivoted away from bitcoin mining, was down 9%.

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 the AI investment, said Michael Donovan, senior research analyst at Compass Point.

Most publicly traded bitcoin miners are increasingly valued by investors as owners of digital infrastructure rather than merely producers of bitcoin, given their power capacity, data center assets and energy contracts.

As a result, even pure-play bitcoin 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 whole 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 itself was little changed, standing below the $65,000 level. Ether was higher by more than 1% at about $1,900.