Bitcoin Miners Just Became the Landlords of the AI Boom

The Signal:

• The asset being leased is not the building — it is permitted, grid-connected, low-cost power.
• These are net-lease deals to investment-grade tenants wearing a crypto ticker.
• Stranded industrial sites are being repriced as digital infrastructure.

The most consequential net-lease deals of 2026 are not being written by net-lease REITs. They are being written by bitcoin miners. Over the past two weeks, TeraWulf locked roughly 19 billion dollars of contracted revenue with Anthropic, CleanSpark signed a roughly 6.6 billion dollar triple-net, and Galaxy filled the full 800 megawatts at its Texas Helios campus with CoreWeave.

What the tenant is actually buying is power. TeraWulf's Kentucky site is a decommissioned aluminum smelter with roughly 480 megawatts already connected to the grid — years of interconnection queue skipped. That head start, not the shell, is the scarce asset in a market where new large-load hookups now take years.

The lease structure is the tell. These are 15-to-20-year, triple-net, take-or-pay-style contracts to hyperscale-credit counterparties — the exact profile institutional net-lease capital chases, at durations and escalators office and retail can no longer offer.

The capital-markets consequence is a re-rating. TeraWulf's HPC leasing overtook its mining revenue in Q1, and Bernstein now counts every major listed miner as an AI-infrastructure play. The equity market is repricing these firms as landlords, not miners.

Implications: Whoever controls interconnected power controls the deal — the developer's edge has shifted from land and construction to grid position and entitlement. Owners of stranded heavy-industrial sites with legacy power should re-underwrite them as data-center optionality, not obsolescence. For net-lease and infrastructure investors, the highest-credit, longest-duration leases in the market are now being originated outside the traditional net-lease channel entirely.

Key Takeaway: The AI buildout's best real estate trade is a power lease — and the operators who already own permitted megawatts, not square feet, are the ones writing it.