Bitcoin miners are quietly becoming AI infrastructure companies. In this episode, Christian Salow talks to Alexandre Schmidt, CFA, Equity Index Manager at CoinShares and the driving force behind the firm’s Bitcoin Mining UCITS ETF, about what is really happening beneath the headlines: how much AI revenue miners actually book today, who their customers are, why energy access decides the winners, and the one balance-sheet risk investors keep underestimating.
Guest: Alexandre Schmidt, CFA, Equity Index Manager at CoinShares, London
In this episode:
- Realized revenue vs. announced contracts: Core Scientific already books far more from AI than from mining, while most listed miners still earn the bulk of their revenue from Bitcoin
- Why “50 percent AI revenue by end of 2026” is the more honest number than the 70 percent often cited
- Concentration risk reframed: the customers are highly creditworthy hyperscalers and chipmakers, so the real danger is execution risk on bespoke, SLA-bound builds
- Energy as the true moat: Texas batching new power approvals, New York’s permit moratorium, and why the Dakotas and the Midwest are the next frontier
- Training vs. inference, and why mining is fully location- and grid-agnostic while AI is not
- Crypto, technology, or infrastructure? How CoinShares’ index draws the line and where an index approach reaches its limits
- GPUs: Nvidia’s CUDA moat, AMD closing the gap, and why Intel and the Asian foundries are not the story
- The warning that matters most: leverage. Tracked miners added roughly 7 billion USD in debt in a single quarter against a combined market cap near 60 billion, with Core Scientific’s debt alone doubling
This conversation is for information purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or an offer to buy or sell any financial instrument.
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Bild © CoinShares
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