Crypto treasury firms pivot to AI after stock bust, but shares keep falling
Treasury-stock premiums have eroded as crypto prices slumped, pushing more than a dozen digital-asset firms toward AI, data centers and power-linked businesses in search of a new growth story.
More than a dozen digital-asset treasury companies have moved toward artificial intelligence and related infrastructure as falling token prices and shrinking valuation premiums undermine the treasury model built on raising capital above net asset value. The early market response has remained weak. K Wave Media has fallen 71% since its May shift toward data center development, while Lixte Biotechnology and Alpha Compute have each dropped 33% after their own strategy changes. Bloomberg said U.S. and Canadian treasury stocks it tracks are down a median 43% this year, as bitcoin fell 49% from its October peak and ether dropped 62% from its August 2025 record. The pressure has pushed some firms beyond crypto into data centers, battery systems, space businesses and small nuclear reactors. Bitcoin miners may have a more credible route into AI because their power contracts, land and facilities can be repurposed for high-performance computing, a path highlighted by Coreweave’s rise from mining to cloud computing and a market value of about $40 billion.
- net asset value: The value of a company's assets minus liabilities, used to assess whether its shares trade at a premium or discount to holdings.
- digital-asset treasury: A company strategy built around raising capital to buy and hold cryptocurrencies on the balance sheet.
- high-performance computing: Large-scale computing infrastructure used for intensive workloads such as artificial intelligence model training and data processing.