Odaily Planet Daily News Six months after the Bitcoin halving event, crypto miners are choosing between two different paths to stay alive. Listed miners including MARA Holdings, Riot Platforms and CleanSpark are retaining the bitcoin they produce, expecting it to appreciate. At the same time, more and more companies are investing more in developing data centers to power artificial intelligence applications. "With profit margins being drastically compressed, one of the few strategies for miners to retain investors is to hold on to the bitcoin they produce, betting on future price appreciation while relying on equity or debt financing," said Wolfie Zhao, an analyst at research firm TheMinerMag. By avoiding selling bitcoin at an immediate loss, they can avoid potential losses and prepare for gains when a bull market emerges. Shares of the two largest listed bitcoin miners, MARA and Riot, have fallen 20% and 36% this year, respectively, and both companies are "hodlers." In addition, Core Scientific's stock price has risen nearly fourfold since it announced in January that it had signed a series of multi-billion-dollar contracts with artificial intelligence upstart CoreWeave. The miner will transform some of its data centers to accommodate GPUs that can generate high-performance computing power for artificial intelligence applications. TeraWulf, whose shares have more than doubled this year, is also developing the AI ​​data center sector. Other bitcoin miners that are putting more resources into AI, such as Iris Energy and Bit Digital, have tended to outperform some of their peers who are doubling down on their holdings. "Our view is that pure play bitcoin mining has a place in the market right now because it creates economic value from growing bitcoin mining capacity," said Paul Golding, senior analyst at Macquarie Capital USA. He has "outperform" ratings on MARA, Riot, Core Scientific, Iris Energy, CleanSpark and Cipher Mining. "This will be a very successful strategy in an environment where bitcoin prices are rising, but it will be a disaster if bitcoin prices crash and you continue to see negative profits," said Ethan Vera, chief operating officer of Luxor Technology. "They are covering up the poor state of the industry and the state of their operations by diluting shareholders and buying new mining machines."” (Bloomberg)