Quick Read
WGMI surged 97% while bitcoin dropped 46%, as CORZ and RIOT pivoted from mining to signing multi-billion-dollar AI infrastructure leases.
Investors wanting direct bitcoin exposure should use IBIT, not WGMI, which now behaves as an AI infrastructure landlord, not a crypto proxy.
Hyperscaler capex from NVIDIA and Microsoft now drives WGMI more than bitcoin, as the fund’s bull case rests on 15-year AI leases.
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The Valkyrie Bitcoin Miners ETF (NASDAQ:WGMI) is up 97% over the past year even though bitcoin has lost 46% of its value in the same window. The divergence has one cause: WGMI holds bitcoin miners, and the miners have quietly stopped being bitcoin miners. AI leasing deals at Riot, Core Scientific, and IREN have decoupled WGMI from the coin it was designed around, and anyone still treating this fund as a leveraged BTC proxy is looking at something that no longer behaves that way.
Where the Fund Stands Today
WGMI is an actively managed basket of publicly traded miners. Shares recently traded near $53, up 38% YTD. Bitcoin sits around $63,000, down 28% YTD. Riot Platforms (NASDAQ:RIOT) reported its cost to mine one bitcoin reached 70% of production value last quarter, up from 50% a year earlier. Mining alone would sink these companies. AI leasing is why the shares have moved the other way.
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Core Scientific (NASDAQ:CORZ) signed a 15-year AMD lease worth more than $14 billion in base contracted revenue across 530 megawatts. IREN (NASDAQ:IREN) inked a five-year, $3.4 billion NVIDIA cloud contract plus a NVIDIA investment of up to $2.1 billion that vests as GPUs deploy. Riot layered a 20-year, 191-megawatt lease with a frontier AI lab on top of its AMD deal, pushing total contracted data-center revenue to $9.8 billion.
The Macro Signal That Actually Matters
AI hyperscaler capex is the macro variable driving WGMI over the next 12 months. The pace at which AMD, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and the frontier labs keep writing multi-billion-dollar power-and-compute checks decides the terminal value of every top holding. Core Scientific CEO Adam Sullivan told analysts “there’s a lot of GPUs sitting on the ground, and those GPUs still need to be plugged in”, and IREN CEO Dan Roberts said “all of our operational capacity is fully contracted”.
