VanEck says Bitcoin miners pursuing AI data center businesses face a roughly $50 billion funding gap, with investors increasingly rewarding companies that have already secured and energized AI infrastructure capacity while punishing those still relying on unproven pipeline projections.
A new framework from asset manager VanEck is drawing clear lines between Bitcoin miners that are genuinely transforming into artificial intelligence infrastructure providers and those that are still selling a story. All of it comes with a sobering price tag: a roughly $50 billion near-term funding gap standing between the sector’s pipeline ambitions and actual delivery.
In a research note, VanEck investment analyst Griffin MacMaster and Head of Digital Assets Research Matthew Sigel laid out what they describe as the first structured valuation approach for the increasingly blurry category of companies that straddle both Bitcoin mining and AI data center hosting.
With financial disclosures varying widely across the sector and cash flows still nascent, VanEck argues the cleanest metric available to investors right now is gross energized power — essentially, how many megawatts a company has actually switched on, not just announced.
