Public bitcoin miners and their data center peers have already spent more on hardware and infrastructure during their latest 2026 reporting periods than they did throughout 2025, underscoring the extraordinary upfront cost of repositioning power assets for artificial intelligence.
A dozen public mining companies tracked by TheEnergyMag recorded $6.87 billion of net cash spending on capital assets in the first half of 2026, with IREN contributing only its March quarter because a June-period cash-flow statement was not available. That compares with $6.50 billion for all of 2025.
Adding Applied Digital, AI-native CoreWeave and Nebius to the basket, a total 15-company cohort spent $30.7 billion, which was 42.6% more than the $21.53 billion recorded for the entirety of 2025.
The calculation measures cash purchases and deposits for hardware, property, plant, equipment and other directly identified productive assets, less cash proceeds and refunds received from asset disposals. It excludes finance-lease principal and noncash equipment additions.
AI-native companies set the scale
CoreWeave and Nebius accounted for almost three-quarters of the 15-company total.
CoreWeave paid $14.12 billion for property and equipment, including capitalized internal-use software, during the six months ended June 30. That already exceeded its $10.31 billion expenditure for all of 2025.
Nebius spent $8.13 billion on property, equipment and intangible assets during the first half, net of $5.2 million in disposal proceeds. Its comparable 2025 spending was $4.07 billion. The company said the investment primarily covered GPUs, related hardware and data-center expansion for its AI cloud business. Nebius’s second-quarter results show that its first-half capital purchases were roughly double the entire prior-year figure reported in its Form 20-F.
Among the miners and former miners, TeraWulf spent $1.61 billion, Applied Digital $1.58 billion, Core Scientific $1.18 billion and Cipher $911.5 million.
This concentration illustrates what the AI pivot entails. Power contracts and available land may give miners a starting advantage, but converting those assets into AI-ready capacity requires substations, buildings, cooling systems, networking equipment and, in some business models, GPUs. Much of the cash leaves before the first corresponding dollar of revenue can be recognized.
Revenue is accelerating — from a much smaller base
The revenue side is beginning to respond.
Across nine miners present in both quarters of the supplied revenue schedule, directly reported HPC, AI cloud and colocation revenue increased 52% to $205.8 million in the second quarter from $135.4 million in the first. Including estimates for MARA and Hut 8, the comparable totals were $215.8 million and $140.3 million.
Core Scientific supplied most of the absolute increase. Its colocation revenue rose to $136.7 million from $77.5 million. TeraWulf’s HPC leasing revenue increased to $31.9 million from $21 million, while Bitdeer’s AI Cloud revenue climbed to $14 million from $3.7 million.
The acceleration nevertheless remains small beside the construction bill. Those nine comparable miners generated $341.2 million of directly reported HPC and AI revenue during the first half while spending $5.11 billion on capital assets — about 15 times the revenue.
The same pattern is visible at the AI-native companies, although their revenue bases are considerably larger.
CoreWeave’s revenue increased 24% to $2.58 billion in the second quarter from $2.08 billion in the first. Its $4.65 billion of first-half revenue was equivalent to about one-third of its $14.12 billion of cash capital spending.
Nebius recorded $582.3 million of second-quarter revenue, up 46% from $399 million in the first quarter. First-half revenue reached $981.3 million, compared with $8.13 billion of net capital spending.
These ratios are not conventional measures of project profitability. Capital spending builds assets intended to generate revenue over several years, while quarterly revenue only captures capacity that has been delivered, accepted and placed into service. Customer advances can also finance construction without immediately appearing as revenue.
Still, the gap captures the central risk of the transition: expenditure is immediate and largely irreversible, while revenue conversion depends on construction schedules, grid connections, customer acceptance and sustained demand.
For the rest of 2026, the key question is not whether AI-related revenue will grow. The filings already show that it is growing. The question is whether that revenue can begin catching up with the unprecedented amount of cash already committed to produce it.
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The capex number is a good reminder that mining is increasingly an infrastructure business before it is a Bitcoin story. For home-scale miners the same discipline shrinks down to power, uptime, cooling, stable hashrate, and current difficulty before treating any box as a plan.