Second-quarter earnings season did more to clarify the crypto-AI relationship than the preceding year of commentary. Across roughly six weeks, the mining sector reported results that increasingly resemble those of a data center sector, digital asset treasury companies began converting balance-sheet strategies into operating ones, and the financing of both moved decisively into private credit. The through-line is not that crypto and AI are converging — that argument is settled. It is that the sector is now being valued on the terms markets apply to infrastructure: contracted revenue, delivery schedules, and counterparty credit.
Mining is now a minority of the mining sector
The clearest evidence is in the revenue mix. Core Scientific reported $136.7 million of colocation revenue against $27.5 million from self-mining in the second quarter, putting colocation at 83% of sales, up from 67% a quarter earlier. TeraWulf’s HPC lease revenue reached 71% of total revenue. Cipher Digital has assembled a multi-billion-dollar contracted backlog anchored by a 15-year, 300-megawatt AWS lease. Bitfarms, now Keel Infrastructure, completed the decommissioning of its U.S. mining operations entirely and reported revenue down 50% year over year as it makes the transition.
The aggregate figures track the same migration. Public miners have shed roughly a fifth of their combined hashrate and sold more than 15,000 bitcoin from treasury peaks to fund conversions. KBW put sector leasing at 95 megawatts in the first quarter, 1.19 gigawatts in the second, and above 2.2 gigawatts year to date. For a growing share of the sector, the operating business is now contracted power delivery.
Riot’s $9.1 billion lease
Riot Platforms supplied the quarter’s marquee transaction on August 10: a 20-year lease for 191 megawatts of critical IT capacity at Rockdale, Texas, worth approximately $9.1 billion through June 2048 and up to $16.1 billion if both five-year extensions are exercised. Riot identified the tenant only as a leading frontier AI lab; Bloomberg reported it as Anthropic. Combined with the AMD lease signed in January, Riot has now contracted 241 megawatts and roughly $9.8 billion of long-term revenue — against a quarter in which mining still produced $113.7 million of its $174.2 million top line.
Riot guided to cumulative net operating income of $7.3 to $8.2 billion over the base term, an average of $365 to $411 million annually. Delivery is phased: 96 megawatts expected in December 2027 and full deployment by June 2028, leveraging an already approved interconnection at the campus. Initial development is funded through a $573 million interim facility from Morgan Stanley. Riot separately disclosed that its 1-gigawatt Corsicana site sits under a non-binding letter of intent with a single tenant.
Tony Scuderi, Chairman and CEO of Imperii Partners: “The dividing line this quarter wasn’t crypto versus AI. It was whether a company owned something a counterparty couldn’t replicate. Substations, interconnection rights, permitted land — those changed hands at real valuations.”
The treasury model gives way to operating businesses
While miners converted assets, digital asset treasury companies attempted to convert narratives. At least a dozen have announced AI or data center strategies this year after their net asset value premiums collapsed; a tracked basket of U.S. and Canadian treasury stocks is down roughly 43% year to date, with several of the most prominent pivots faring considerably worse. The underlying assets did not cooperate — bitcoin has fallen sharply from its October 2025 peak, and ether remains far below its 2025 record — leaving multiple vehicles trading at or below the value of their holdings.
The distinction between the two groups is the entire lesson of the quarter. A miner pivoting to AI is redeploying a substation, an interconnection queue position, and a permitting record. A treasury vehicle pivoting to AI is redeploying a balance sheet into an industry where capital is the least scarce input. Markets have priced that difference accurately and quickly, which is not something the digital asset sector has consistently done.
The story moved to the credit markets
Underneath both trends, the financing has institutionalized. Morgan Stanley’s facility to Riot, Google’s warrant-for-backstop structures with converting miners, and the broader shift toward private credit — projected to supply roughly $800 billion of an estimated $1.5 trillion data center funding gap — mean crypto-adjacent infrastructure is now underwritten by mainstream lenders on infrastructure terms.
The payments side of the convergence advanced on a quieter track. Coinbase and Cloudflare formalized the x402 Foundation in July, establishing neutral governance for the standard alongside a monetization gateway that would let publishers charge for pages, APIs, and datasets in stablecoins. Settlement volumes remain early and uneven, which is characteristic of the buildout phase of any payment rail. The institutions committing to these standards are underwriting a multi-year adoption curve rather than a quarterly one.
What we’re watching
Three questions will shape the next several quarters. The first is execution: the sector has contracted considerably more capacity than it has delivered, and the ability to build on schedule is becoming the primary differentiator between operators. The second is how this new asset class gets financed, as long-duration lease paper reaches private credit and securitization markets and is underwritten on the same terms as other infrastructure. The third is consolidation, as the gap between asset value and market value across the digital asset landscape creates conditions for meaningful transaction activity.
None of this diminishes what the sector built. The infrastructure being repurposed today exists because an industry spent a decade solving for power, siting, and interconnection at scale — and that turned out to be the scarcest input in the AI buildout. The opportunity now is to be valued accordingly.