Bitcoin Miners Have the Thing AI Needs the Most

AI data centers need buildings with a grid connection, transformers, cooling, and a power contract already in place. Those things have become increasingly scarce lately, which has made an unlikely group of companies valuable.

For the past few years, bitcoin miners across the world have been switching off machines, renaming themselves and signing long-term compute deals with AI companies. Companies that once described themselves as bitcoin miners now describe themselves as AI and high-performance computing businesses.

Singapore-based Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR) is moving in a similar direction, and its July operations update gives us a glimpse of what that transition actually looks like from the inside.

Bitdeer’s AI cloud revenue reached $14.0 million in the second quarter against $1.3 million a year earlier. Annualized recurring revenue from contracted GPU orders stood at roughly $76 million at the end of July, on 4,248 deployed GPUs running at 95% utilization. A 9.5 MW facility in Malaysia has been fully committed under long-term offtake agreements before it is even energized, representing more than $800 million in expected contracted revenue, with a larger 21.7 MW site now in contract discussions. In other words, capacity is being sold before it is plugged in.

The largest of those commitments came in early August, when Bitdeer signed a 16-year lease at its Tydal campus in Norway. The deal covers 121 IT MW configured to run NVIDIA GPUs, with approximately $4.7 billion of contracted revenue over the base term and as much as $8.0 billion if a one-time eight-year extension is exercised. The tenant is a subsidiary of Volta, serving a leading AI lab, and roughly $1.3 billion of the obligation is anticipated to be backstopped by letters of credit arranged through affiliates of two large financial institutions. 

Bitdeer Lands $4.7B Norway Lease With a16z-, Nvidia- And Dell-Backed Volta https://t.co/J0l1Ov9hVU

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 4, 2026

Mining revenue constantly changes, but a 16-year lease with a credit backstop does not. But how does a company pay for that buildout? Refitting a mine for AI is expensive, and several operators have had to wind down hash rate or sell down bitcoin holdings to fund the change. 

Not Bitdeer. The company is actually growing its mining business into the transition rather than shrinking it: 1,190 bitcoin produced in July, up 322% year on year, with self-mining hash rate at 76.7 EH/s against 22.3 EH/s a year earlier, and $168.4 million of self-mining revenue in the second quarter. 

The company sells most of the bitcoin it produces, which gave it $195.5 million from digital asset sales during the quarter. Mining becomes a monthly source of cash while the AI capacity is being built.

Underneath all of it is about 2,980 MW of electrical capacity across the United States, Norway, Bhutan, Ethiopia and Malaysia, of which 1,752 MW is already online. Bitdeer also designs and manufactures its own mining chips, the SEALMINER series, which gives it very good levels of fleet efficiency, now averaging 15.8 J/TH against 25.7 a year ago. 

That gap between contracted and completed is where much of the sector now sits, and it is a gap that has to be funded. The scarce input in AI is energized capacity, and the companies being asked to supply it are the ones that spent years assembling power in places most investors could not find on a map. For companies such as Bitdeer, the bitcoin they mine on the way is what pays for the wait.