VanEck: Bitcoin Miners Sitting on a Gold Mine as AI Grows

VanEck Bitcoin miners thesis just got a lot louder. Matthew Sigel, the asset manager's head of digital asset research, told CNBC's Squawk Box that Bitcoin miners are 'sitting on a gold mine' — and the market hasn't priced it in yet. His case: miners have been quietly transforming themselves into AI infrastructure plays while the rest of Wall Street still thinks of them as commodity operators.

Why VanEck Thinks the Market Is Getting Miners Wrong

The core argument is a valuation gap. According to Sigel, mining companies still trade at a massive discount to traditional data center peers when you measure market cap against megawatt capacity. That's not a small quibble — it's the kind of mispricing that tends to get corrected quickly once institutional money starts paying attention.

Miners have been 'aggressively diversifying' their Bitcoin capacity to serve the VanEck Bitcoin miners thesis: AI demand is eating electricity faster than the grid can handle it, and miners — who already operate in remote, power-dense locations with flexible load agreements — are structurally positioned to absorb that demand. 'These miners were early to identify that they were sitting on a gold mine in terms of the cost of capital that they can earn by pivoting,' Sigel said in the interview.

The discount to data center peers is the number that should be keeping mining company CFOs up at night — but in a good way. If the market re-rates them as AI infrastructure operators rather than commodity miners, the upside is significant.

These miners were early to identify that they were sitting on a gold mine in terms of the cost of capital that they can earn by pivoting.

The Grid Angle Nobody Is Talking About

Here's the part of Sigel's argument that doesn't get enough attention: the defense angle. Grid resilience isn't just about AI data centers anymore. 'The way that missiles are shot out of the sky now is using lasers and high intensity electricity, which requires grid resilience,' he told CNBC. That's not typical crypto analyst territory — but it reframes Bitcoin mining as a national infrastructure asset, not just a speculative compute play.

The load balancing piece is more straightforward. Miners can curtail power consumption during peak grid demand — 'just lose a little money,' as Sigel put it — which makes them genuinely useful to grid operators. Reshoring, AI buildout, and defense applications are all converging on the same constraint: electricity. Miners who can flip the switch off on demand are suddenly a feature, not a bug.

'It's a really useful load balancing tool,' Sigel said, describing how miners can turn off when electricity is needed elsewhere. That flexibility is something conventional data centers can't easily replicate.

What Are Bitcoin Miners Actually Doing in 2026?

Which mining companies are pivoting to AI?

Two names Sigel cited are already executing the pivot — and doing it at scale. Core Scientific Morgan Stanley financing of up to $1 billion last week gave the company a serious war chest to fund its shift toward AI compute infrastructure. When Morgan Stanley is writing nine-figure checks to back a former Bitcoin miner's AI transition, the thesis is not hypothetical anymore.

MARA went a different route. Rather than raising debt financing, the company struck a partnership deal to repurpose its existing mining sites into something more valuable. The MARA bitcoin mining AI data center announcement in February 2026 — a strategic tie-up with Starwood to build hyperscale, AI-capable digital infrastructure — shows how far along the industry's transformation actually is.

These aren't dabbling pivots. Both deals represent full directional shifts — and they happened within weeks of each other.

What Does This Mean for Bitcoin's Price Right Now?

Sigel's AI infrastructure case is bullish on miners. His near-term Bitcoin read is more measured. He framed the macro setup as increasingly correlated to broader risk assets and global liquidity — which means oil shocks and geopolitical stress are real headwinds. Bitcoin is currently stuck in a $59,000 to $72,000 trading range, according to Sigel, and it's probably staying there until liquidity conditions shift.

The one piece of good news: selling pressure from long-term holders has faded over the past month. After locking in profits earlier in the cycle, those hands appear to have stepped back. Sigel said this is 'giving more stability' to price action — which tracks with the current tight range around $70,120, up 0.9% on the day.

On prediction market Myriad, users are split down the middle — a 50% chance on BTC reaching $84,000 vs. a slide toward $55,000. Call that a coin flip, or call it the market's honest admission that macro uncertainty is doing the heavy lifting right now.