Bitcoin held a $70,000 price floor in early morning trading hours on Thursday amid geopolitical conflict in Iran, while bitcoin mining stocks dropped at the market open.
Applied Digital (NASDAQ: APLD) dropped 5.50%, Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT) fell 5.44%, and IREN (NASDAQ: IREN) decreased 4.76% to start the Thursday session. The broader week remains green for the sector despite the morning pullback.
QCP Capital outlined the strength of bitcoin as a safe-haven asset during the escalating conflict in Iran. Traditional risk assets struggled while oil prices initially spiked above $115. The price of oil settled lower, and bitcoin maintained its position around $70,000. Crude oil traded at $93 per barrel on Thursday morning, according to Bloomberg market data.
BTC ETFs provided continuous capital inflows to support the current price level. Investors added $115.17 million in daily net inflows on Wednesday, with all-time net inflows at $55.90 billion, according to SoSoValue.
Fund flows demonstrated consistency earlier in the week. Tuesday and Monday brought in $250.92 million and $167.03 million in daily total net inflows, respectively.
As bitcoin mining margins weaken, bitcoin mining operators are actively acquiring data center infrastructure to support AI/HPC workloads. The largest public bitcoin miner by computing power, MARA (NASDAQ: MARA), finalized a 64% controlling stake in Exaion in February.The French government scrutinized the acquisition of the French AI/HPC operator over national sovereignty concerns.
The deal underscores an industry-wide pivot toward AI workloads. Also in the news recently, TeraWulf (NASDAQ: WULF) has purchased two sites in Kentucky and Maryland for its own AI data center business line.
Other operators are funding infrastructure expansion through equity markets. IREN initiated a $6 billion at-the-market equity offering to finance hardware purchases and its AI infrastructure build outs after purchasing 50,000 NVIDIA B300 GPUs.
