Wall Street is paying up for Bitcoin miners’ AI infrastructure before most of it is built
VanEck says AI-linked miners are earning premium valuations before most leased capacity is delivered, leaving execution, dilution, debt, and tenant quality as the next market test.A megawatt leased to an AI tenant now commands a different price on Wall Street than a megawatt sitting in a Bitcoin miner's pipeline, and the distance between the two has become the central pricing question for the entire sector.
VanEck's latest framework for valuing publicly traded miners shows that companies with signed AI and high-performance computing leases trade at more than 10 times gross energy output, while miners with little or no contracted capacity trade at roughly 2 to 6 times that metric.
Investors have started treating leased megawatts as a distinct, more valuable asset class than mined Bitcoin or unsold power capacity.The premium is arriving before the capacity
VanEck puts delivered AI and HPC capacity across the peer group at only about 25% of what has been leased. Wall Street is paying for contracts today and for construction outcomes the sector has not yet delivered.
The near-term funding shortfall for that construction totals roughly $50 billion across the group, with long-term capital needs climbing toward $221 billion if the full pipeline of announced projects ultimately converts into built sites.
VanEck's valuation model assumes a baseline net operating income of about $1.5 million per megawatt for AI and colocation sites and applies an enterprise value multiple of 15 times that figure.
The model also offsets the result against greenfield construction costs of roughly $10 million per megawatt, climbing to about $12 million for projects further out as construction inflation compounds.
A single megawatt implies a gross enterprise value near $22.5 million, against a pre-financing value of about $12.5 million after capex, before any probability discount for delivery risk or financing costs is applied.