Bitcoin Miners Plunge as $1.12 Billion in Crypto Longs Get Wiped Out and an OpenAI Revenue Scare Rattles AI Bets
Riot fell 11%, Cipher and Hut 8 dropped 10% each and CleanSpark slid 9% as bitcoin weakened, leveraged longs were liquidated and a report that OpenAI's revenue is running about $20 billion below expectations hit AI data-center plays.
Bitcoin mining stocks plunged Thursday as bitcoin weakened, worries about AI infrastructure spending intensified and the crypto market recorded $1.12 billion in leveraged liquidations over 24 hours. The damage fell overwhelmingly on traders betting on higher prices, and the miners that have pivoted toward AI data centers fell harder than the broader crypto sector.
A one-sided flush of leveraged longs
Liquidations happen when a leveraged position loses so much value that the exchange closes it automatically. Those forced sales push prices lower, which triggers more liquidations. Thursday's data shows a sell-off that was speeding up, not fading: the four-hour total of $751.6 million is about two-thirds of the whole 24-hour figure.
| Window | Total liquidated | Longs | Long share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 24 hours | $1.12B | $1.04B | 93% |
| 4 hours | $751.6M | $704.9M | 94% |
| 1 hour | $169M | $161.7M | 96% |
Short positions accounted for just $83.7 million of the 24-hour total. The largest single liquidation was an Ethereum position worth $19.98 million on Hyperliquid.
Miners fall harder than crypto
Bitcoin miners that have been repositioning as AI data-center operators were among the biggest decliners, underperforming the broader cryptocurrency sector. Riot Platforms was down 11% even though it signed a compute and data-center agreement with Anthropic earlier this year, a deal reported at about $9.1 billion.
| Company | Ticker | Move Thursday |
|---|---|---|
| Riot Platforms | RIOT | -11% |
| Cipher Digital | CIFR | -10% |
| Hut 8 | HUT | -10% |
| CleanSpark | CLSK | -9% |
| TeraWulf | WULF | -8% |
| MARA Holdings | MARA | -6% |
| Coinbase | COIN | about -3% |
| Strategy | MSTR | about -3% |
Moves are the intraday declines reported during Thursday's session and may differ from final closing figures.
The OpenAI revenue scare
The extra pressure on miners came from the AI side of their story. A Financial Times report said OpenAI's annualized revenue is roughly $20 billion below what had been reported earlier. That matters because several miners are spending heavily on data-center expansion aimed at AI customers, a capital-intensive bet that depends on the AI companies buying that capacity continuing to grow quickly.
The combination left these stocks exposed on two fronts at once: the bitcoin price that drives their legacy mining income, and the AI demand story that has driven much of their recent valuation.
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