Throughout the first half of 2025, institutions made their presence felt in Bitcoin mining stocks by going in for a massive stake purchase.
Notable among them were companies such as IREN, CIFR, CORZ, APLD, and MARA, which not only attracted the maximum number of new institutional holders but also witnessed the most significant inflows of capital. The story is elaborated in the September 11, 2025, guest post by Cindy Feng on Bitcoinminingstock.io, and it digests the 2024 Bitcoin Mining Review findings, co-authored with Nico from Digital Mining Solutions, in which the main topics were: rising institutional interest, the AI/HPC narrative, and the preference for large-cap miners. Meanwhile, the recent 13F filings continue to support these themes but at the same time, they allow for a deeper understanding of the shifts in investor sentiment.
Continued Institutional Rotation and Capital Flows
The enthusiasm of institutional investors for Bitcoin miners with a market capitalization of over $100 million remained at a high level throughout the first half of 2025. As a result, almost all the companies in this segment enjoyed the positive trend of the numbers of institutional owners along with the total value of capital invested. It is the case of IREN, CORZ, and APLD that out of the rest, were the most outstanding, in such a way that each of them was able to add over 40 new institutional holders on their shareholder register. What was it that drew them together? The fact that their businesses provide an almost 'direct exposure' to the AI/HPC narrative. For example, CORZ and APLD have managed to attract high-profile clients such as CoreWeave for multiple colocation projects totaling more than $1 billion, while IREN has become a major GPU player and built AI-ready infrastructure. The market has been responding to these bold moves and is eagerly anticipating miners turning into lucrative data center deals that require less tech expertise than Bitcoin.Capital flows followed the pattern of the trend. A good reason for these changes was probably the fact that CORZ, MARA, and IREN were the top leaders among the increased value of institutional investments, and CIFR and APLD were following them closely. MARA, especially, is devoid of AI/HPC exposure, but it is still at the top of the list with its very low hash rate and heavy Bitcoin treasury, thus giving pure Bitcoin beta exposure of the utmost scale. Not so long ago, MARA was overtaken by BMNR and IREN as far as market cap is concerned, however, it is still getting a lot of money deposited from rich investors.
Underperformers and Diverging Fortunes
Miners of different kinds did not have the opportunity of getting the favor of institutional investors, and the loss of their confidence was accompanied by the reduced number of shares held by them. The trend was to the disadvantage of BITF, HUT, and CAN, which saw the number of institutional holders fall, while RIOT, CLSK, and CAN witnessed net withdrawals of investment. CAN has witnessed a decline in the share price by 65.60% year to date (YTD), indicating poor performance. Relative to the rest of the pack, both CLSK and BITF did not show strong performances, with their YTD gains only reaching 4.99% and 6.17%, respectively. Despite losing 13 institutional owners, HUT somehow managed to maintain a strong performance YTD, which may be explained by the activities of the retail sector or its transformation into an energy infrastructure platform, with the compute segment becoming American Bitcoin.
Miners like RIOT, CLSK, and BITF have indicated their intention of employing HPC but do not seem to have either energized capacity or signed contracts, which may be the reasons why they have not attracted a lot of interest from institutional investors. However, there is a strong contrast between these and the companies with a high percentage of institutional shares in CORZ (78.44%), CIFR (76.06%), and APLD (71.36%), showing that these companies are leaders in the field. BTBT is a small-cap company with 65.52% institutional ownership and is, therefore, also a remarkable one, while BTDR, despite having a market cap over $1 billion, is only at 22.18%. This gap suggests that narrative and visibility are just as important as market cap in attracting institutional interest.
What’s Changed and What’s Next
The most recent data supports the 2024 report’s results: institutions are increasing their Bitcoin miners' exposure, however, the capital is not distributed evenly. The inflows are dominated by large-cap miners with AI/HPC contracts or visible GPU deployment—IREN, CORZ, CIFR, and APLD. MARA is still an exception and develops well on its Bitcoin-focused scale. Miners with small capital or located in non-U.S. and those without AI exposure have a hard time gaining traction.
In the future, the execution will be very important. HPC-exposed miners need to energize their capacity and reach their contract milestones to keep up investor confidence. Those who have joined the AI/HPC narrative late have the difficult task of coming up with credible strategies that are substantiated by real results. Miners that are heavily backed by institutional investors might run into the problem of saturation whereas those with low ownership but with strong infrastructure are likely to experience growth if they have the right catalysts. We continue to see that the market is dynamic, and those who deliver will be the winners in the succeeding quarters.
Methodology and Limitations
The current analysis is based on 13F reports as of June 30, 2025, that reflect long equity positions of U.S. institutional investors, and exclude derivatives, swaps, and most non-U.S. filers. Since 13Fs are backward-looking, the present institutional holdings may be different.
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