Bitcoin (BTC) slid toward $75,000 on Wednesday, down nearly 2%, even as US stock indexes closed at fresh record highs.
Key Points:
- Bitcoin fell while the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all set record closes, widening the split between crypto and equities.
- Former Bitcoin miners that pivoted to AI infrastructure rallied hard, with Cipher and Hut 8 hitting new highs.
- Analysts tie the surge to power capacity, not crypto prices, as the semiconductor rally lifts the sector.
BTC Diverges From Stocks
The decline unfolded the same day the Dow rose 182.60 points to 50,644.28, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq also notching record closes.
The S&P 500 had earlier crossed 7,500 for the first time, carried largely by technology and semiconductor names.
The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index climbed 5.6% and now sits up nearly 77% for the year. That run has spilled into a different corner of the market, one Bitcoin investors know well.
Cipher Digital shares jumped close to an all-time high on Wednesday, while Hut 8 carved out fresh records. IREN came within 10% of its own peak after unveiling another AI expansion tied to Dell.
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Miners Chase AI Power
The pattern points to something other than crypto sentiment. TeraWulf rose roughly 5.3% Wednesday, Riot Platforms added 2.8%, and the gains tracked the broader power-and-AI group rather than Bitcoin itself.
Cipher chief executive Tyler Page called 2026 "the year of execution" for the company, citing new lease wins. Cipher says it now holds 700 megawatts of contracted high-performance computing capacity tied to about $11.4 billion in future revenue.
Research from Bernstein found that 11 publicly traded miners together control around 27 gigawatts of current and projected power capacity. Analysts argue that electricity, not hash rate, is now the scarce input investors want.
Still, some warn that as large miners shift toward AI, Bitcoin network security could face concentration risks. Most expect a hybrid model to win out over time.
Bitcoin Recovery Stalls
The split caps a rough stretch for the asset. Bitcoin crashed more than 52% from its October 2025 record high near $126,000, bottoming around $60,000 in February before clawing back. Its correlation with tech equities has swung sharply since the US-Iran conflict began in late February, leaving the miner-to-AI trade, once a Bitcoin proxy, increasingly running on its own clock.
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