Bitcoin mining stock prices were swept up in a wider market sell off today, with the market bloodletting draining nearly $8 billion from the cohort’s collective market capitalization in one day.
Per BitcoinMiningStock.io, which tracks metrics for 34 publicly traded bitcoin mining stocks, the sector’s market cap declined from $69.1 billion to $61.3 billion between November 12 and November 13.
Week-over-week, the cohort’s total capitalization is down 22% from $78.7 billion, and they’re down a further 35% from their all-time high capitalization of $94.2 billion on October 15.
Bitcoin mining stock prices were not alone in today’s sell off. Equities fell across the board, led by the AI and tech stocks that have been driving the market this year. The Nasdaq suffered the heaviest loss at 2.29% on the day, followed by the S&P 500 (-1.66%) and Dow Jones (-1.65%).
Bitcoin closed the day down 2.15%, and even gold wasn’t spared from the turmoil (-1%).
Still, AI-adjacent stocks were hit the hardest, with Nvidia losing 3.58%. Neocloud darlings CoreWeave and Nebius took 8.3% and 6% hits, respectively.
But bitcoin miners dipping into AI were hammered more than most, as many in the cohort declined by double digits on the day. Thursday’s price action was perhaps the nail in the coffin of a brutal week for the sector.
Thursday’s bloodbath comes smack dab in the middle of earnings season, with many companies having already reported financials. Some of these, like CoreWeave and Bitdeer, missed their earnings, reverberating fears among investors that return-on-investment timelines for data center spending will be farther out than not.
To this point, recent research from Mckinsey & Company estimates that worldwide data center CAPEX will total $6.7 trillion between now and 2030. Meanwhile, JPMorgan research argues that AI data centers will need $650 billion in collective annual revenue to eke out a 10% return on CAPEX spend by 2029.
Speaking to these fears, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon commented recently that he could see the AI bubble popping within the next 1-2 years as investment spend outpaces profits.
“I think that there will be a lot of capital that’s deployed that will turn out to not deliver returns, and when that happens, people won’t feel good,” he said at an investors’ conference in Turin, Italy in October.
