Bitcoin Mining stocks are off to a strong start in 2026, buoyed by declining online competition and new enthusiasm for high-performance computing (HPC), Wall Street bank JPMorgan said in a report on Monday.
The bank noted that the 14 U.S.-listed Bitcoin miners and data center operators it tracks ended last month with a combined market capitalization of $60 billion, a 23% month-on-month increase that far outpaced the S&P 500’s 1% gain.
The rally was partly driven by news that Riot Platforms signed an HPC deal with AMD at its 700-megawatt Rockdale facility, underscoring the miner’s push to diversify beyond Bitcoin.
Faced with record-low profit margins following the 2024 halving, Bitcoin miners are repositioning themselves as digital infrastructure providers, repurposing power-intensive mining farms into artificial intelligence-ready data centers in search of more stable long-term revenue.
Meanwhile, valuations continue to rise. Analysts Reginald Smith and Charles Pearce said that at the end of the year, mining stocks were trading at about 150% of the four-year block reward opportunity and about three times the post-2022 average, highlighting the growing disconnect between miner valuations and Bitcoin prices.
Operationally, January brought relief. JPMorgan Chase said that winter storms across the United States forced widespread power cuts, causing average network computing power to drop 6% month-on-month to 981 exahashes per second (EH/s). This month, the computing power once dropped to 700 EH/s, while the mining difficulty dropped 5% from December and 10% lower than the historical high in November.
Computing power refers to the total computing power used to mine and process transactions on the proof-of-work blockchain, and is an indicator of industry competition and mining difficulty. It is measured in exahash per second.
Reduced competition helps offset the effects of Bitcoin price weakness. Analysts estimate that miners’ daily block reward revenue in January was about $42,350/EH/s, up slightly from December, while gross profits jumped 24% to about $21,200/EH/s as network efficiency improved. The bank noted that profitability remains well below pre-halving levels.
Stock performance was generally positive. Twelve of the 14 miners tracked by the bank outperformed Bitcoin’s 4% loss in January, with IREN (IREN) up 42% and Cango (CANG) down 18%. Even after the rebound, the group’s consolidated valuation remains about 15% below its October 2025 high.
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