Bitcoin mining stocks started 2026 on a strong note, supported by declining networking competition and fresh enthusiasm around high-performance computing (HPC), Wall Street bank JPMorgan said in Monday’s report.
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, up 23% month over month, well above the S&P 500’s 1% gain.
The rally was helped in part by news that Riot Platforms signed an HPC deal with AMD at its 700 megawatt Rockdale facility, underscoring miners’ push to diversify beyond bitcoin.
Facing record low margins after the halving in 2024, bitcoin miners are repositioning themselves as digital infrastructure providers, converting power-dense mining sites to AI-ready data centers in search of more stable, long-term earnings.
At the same time, valuations continued to expand. Analysts Reginald Smith and Charles Pearce said mining stocks were trading at about 150% of the four-year block reward option at the end of the year, about three times the post-2022 average, highlighting a growing disconnect between miner valuations and bitcoin’s price.
Operationally, January brought relief. Winter storms across the United States forced widespread curtailments, pulling the average network hashrate down 6% month over month to 981 exahashes per second (EH/s), JPMorgan said. The hash rate briefly fell as low as 700 EH/si during the month, while mining difficulty fell 5% from December and sat 10% below November’s all-time high.
The hashrate refers to the total combined computational power used to mine and process transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain, and is a proxy for industry competition and mining difficulty. It is measured in exahashes per second.
This decrease in competition helped offset weaker bitcoin prices. The analysts estimated that miners earned about $42,350 per EH/si daily block reward revenue in January, up slightly from December, while gross profit jumped 24% to around $21,200 per EH/s as network efficiency improved. Still, profitability remains well below pre-halving levels, the bank noted.
Share performance was largely positive. Twelve of the 14 miners tracked by the bank outperformed bitcoin’s 4% decline in January, with IREN (IREN) up 42% and Cango (CANG) down 18%. Even after the rally, the group’s overall valuation remains about 15% below the October 2025 high.
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