The hits just keep on coming for bitcoin miners. Not only is the core asset plummeting, but their earnings are also falling short of analyst estimates.
Shares of two of the biggest bitcoin miners, IREN and CleanSpark plummeted on Thursday, as their quarterly earnings fell short of Wall Street hopes.
The similarities don’t stop there; the two miners had started to pivot to AI infrastructure last year. In theory, that's a match made in heaven: bitcoin miners usually have well-powered, large industrial spaces filled with top-grade computers doing round-the-clock calculations to earn bitcoin, which can be easily turned into GPU farms for AI.
However, everything isn’t going according to plan. Bitcoin’s value has nearly halved from its all-time high of over $120,000 last year, and there are some concerns around the meteoric rise of AI firms and their financials.
A year ago, bitcoin miners switching to AI seemed to be making a smart corporate move, like the big tech firms building large scale servers. But now, with bitcoin mining becoming increasingly expensive, a shortage of GPU capacity and energy demand threatening the AI growth story, most miners are left without a paddle, and Wall Street is noticing.
IREN posted a net loss of $155.4mn in Q2 2026, a far cry from the $384.6mn profit in Q1, which was largely the result of an unrealised mark-to-market gain on convertible-note hedges rather than overall business metrics.
IREN’s switch to AI, coupled with a lacklustre bitcoin, is taking its toll on the stock, which is down more than 30% from its all-time high last year.
CleanSpark suffered a similar fate. It reported a Q4 2025 loss of $378.7mn, compared to a profit of $246.8mn in Q4 2024. Shares of CleanSpark tumbled nearly 20% after the earnings.
