Bitcoin BTC$76,073.52 mining stocks kicked off 2026 on a strong note, buoyed by falling network competition and fresh enthusiasm around high-performance computing (HPC), Wall Street bank JPMorgan said in the Monday 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, far outpacing the S&P 500’s 1% gain.
The rally was helped in part by news that Riot Platforms signed a HPC agreement with AMD at its 700-megawatt Rockdale facility, underscoring miners’ push to diversify beyond bitcoin.
Facing record-low margins after the 2024 halving, bitcoin miners are repositioning as digital infrastructure providers, repurposing power-dense mining sites into AI-ready data centers in search of steadier, long-term revenue.
At the same time, valuations continued to stretch. Analysts Reginald Smith and Charles Pearce said mining stocks were trading at roughly 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 bitcoin’s price.
Operationally, January brought relief. Winter storms across the U.S. forced widespread curtailments, dragging the average network hashrate down 6% month over month to 981 exahashes per second (EH/s), JPMorgan said. The hashrate briefly dipped as low as 700 EH/s 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 competition in the industry and mining difficulty. It is measured in exahashes per second.
That drop in competition helped offset weaker bitcoin prices. The analysts estimated miners earned about $42,350 per EH/s in daily block reward revenue in January, up slightly from December, while gross profit jumped 24% to roughly $21,200 per EH/s as network efficiency improved. Still, profitability remains well below pre-halving levels, the bank noted.
Stock performance was broadly positive. Twelve of the 14 miners tracked by the bank outperformed bitcoin’s 4% decline in January, with IREN (IREN) rising 42% and Cango (CANG) falling 18%. Even after the rally, the group’s combined valuation remains about 15% below October 2025 highs.
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