bitcoin Mining stocks started 2026 on a strong note, buoyed by declining networking competition and new 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 finished last month with a combined market capitalization of $60 billion, up 23% month over month, far outpacing 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 facility in Rockdale, underscoring miners’ push to diversify beyond bitcoin.
Facing record margins after the 2024 halving, bitcoin miners are repositioning themselves as digital infrastructure providers, repurposing energy-dense mining sites into AI-ready data centers in search of more stable long-term revenues.
At the same time, valuations continued to rise. Analysts Reginald Smith and Charles Pearce said mining stocks were trading at about 150% of the four-year block reward opportunity at year-end, about three times the post-2022 average, highlighting a growing disconnect between miner valuations and the price of bitcoin.
Operationally, January brought relief. Winter storms in the US forced widespread reductions, causing the network’s average hash rate to fall 6% month over month to 981 exahashes per second (EH/s), JPMorgan said. The hashrate briefly fell to 700 EH/s during the month, while the mining difficulty fell 5% since December and was 10% below November’s all-time high.
Hashrate refers to the total combined computing power used to mine and process transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain, and is an indicator of industry competition and mining difficulty. It is measured in exahashes per second.
That drop in competition helped offset the decline in bitcoin prices. Analysts estimated that miners earned about $42,350 per EH/s in daily block reward revenue in January, slightly up from December, while gross profit rose 24% to about $21,200 per EH/s as network efficiency improved. Still, profitability remains well below pre-halving levels, the bank said.
Stock performance was generally positive. Twelve of the 14 miners tracked by the bank outperformed bitcoin’s 4% drop in January, with IREN (IREN) rising 42% and Cango (CANG) falling 18%. Even after the rally, the group’s combined valuation remains around 15% below October 2025 highs.
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