Bitcoin (BTC) mining in 2025: Winners and laggards emerge as IREN leads and BTDR falls behind
Bitcoin miners diversified into AI/HPC infrastructure significantly outperformed pure-play miners in 2025, with IREN leading gains.Summary
In 2025, as Bitcoin faced a tough year, public mining stocks showed stark contrasts based on diversification into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. IREN led the sector with a 300% year-to-date gain due to major GPU cloud deals and Microsoft's backing, followed by Cipher Mining (+230%) and Hut 8 (+139%) leveraging AI hosting partnerships and data center leases. Conversely, pure-play miners lagged; Marathon Digital, despite holding the most BTC, dropped 44%, while Bitdeer Technologies (BTDR) was the biggest underperformer, falling around 50% after reporting a large net loss and disclosing delays to its ASIC chip, casting doubt on its AI expansion. The year clearly demonstrated that miners repurposing sites for AI data centers significantly outperformed those focused solely on Bitcoin mining.
(Source：CoinDesk)