Public Bitcoin miners are committing enormous capital to artificial intelligence infrastructure even as their directly reported AI revenue remains small. According to an Aug. 20 analysis from BlocksBridge Consulting, nine public miners spent $5.11 billion on capital assets during the first half of 2026, while their combined AI and high-performance computing revenue reached only $341.2 million—a roughly 15-to-1 spending-to-revenue ratio.
The second quarter showed momentum: AI and HPC revenue climbed to $205.8 million, up 52% from approximately $135.4 million in the first quarter. Core Scientific reported $136.7 million in colocation revenue for Q2, while capital expenditure hit $797.5 million. The company was billing customers for 437 megawatts of capacity by mid-July and announced AMD-related agreements that could cover about 530 megawatts across five sites, with more than $14 billion in potential base revenue over 15 years.
Meanwhile, Broadcom is negotiating to secure more than $60 billion and possibly up to $100 billion in debt financing to support AI chip production for Anthropic and other clients. The structure includes a junior debt portion around $30 billion and senior secured debt of $60 billion to $70 billion, with a special-purpose vehicle keeping the debt off Broadcom’s balance sheet. Blackstone and Apollo Global Management are in talks to participate, and Goldman Sachs Research expects AI-related debt issuance to approach $500 billion by 2026. Credit strategist Amanda Lynam said it’s hard to overstate the importance of this theme in the credit markets, both in terms of its overall scale.
Broadcom’s AI business is already accelerating sharply: in the fiscal second quarter ended May 3, 2026, AI semiconductor revenue reached $10.8 billion, up 143% year over year, with CEO Hock Tan guiding for more than $16 billion in the third quarter. The company’s earlier platform with Apollo and Blackstone launched in June with an initial $35 billion transaction to expand Anthropic’s computing capacity by more than one gigawatt, with an eventual goal of 20+ gigawatts by 2028.
Broader capital spending across 15 miners and AI data center firms reached $30.7 billion in the latest 2026 reporting periods, 42.6% above the $21.53 billion recorded for all of 2025. MARA Holdings sold $1.5 billion of Bitcoin in the first quarter as it expanded its digital infrastructure strategy, while HIVE’s HPC revenue increased 94% to $19.5 million during its 2026 financial year. CoinShares has also renamed WGMI as the CoinShares Bitcoin Mining and Digital Power ETF, expanding its mandate across miners, data centers, semiconductors, power generation and advanced computing companies.
The transition highlights a growing financing race in AI infrastructure, where access to cheap and deep capital is becoming as important as chip performance. For Bitcoin miners, the challenge is converting power contracts and land into AI-ready capacity—substations, cooling systems, networking equipment and sometimes GPUs—before tenant payments begin. Until that conversion is complete, the revenue base remains small compared with the capital committed, keeping pressure on balance sheets and Bitcoin sales.
