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Bitcoin miners are facing growing pressure to diversify as market volatility, hash rate competition, and falling prices squeeze profitability. And for Bitdeer, that means looking beyond Bitcoin entirely.

“Bitcoin miners are going to have to evolve over the next few years to stay alive, I believe,” said Jeff LaBerge, Head of Capital Markets and Strategic Initiatives at Bitdeer, during a TheStreet Roundtable interview with Rob Nelson. “That can be done.”

LaBerge didn’t mince words when asked about the challenges facing miners in today’s environment. “Bitcoin miners are essentially a leveraged play on Bitcoin,” he said. “We generate Bitcoin… at a discount to the market through infrastructure and compute. And we hold— a lot of us hold Bitcoin too. So it is that very leveraged play.”

He added, “Bitcoin's gotten hammered here. Bitcoin miners have gotten hammered much more over the last couple months. We were at, again, near all-time highs in December, and now we've all given a lot of that back.”

But LaBerge stressed that mining economics are driven by more than just price. “There’s something else called global hash rate… how much compute is currently competing for Bitcoin that get produced every day. So that plays into it as well.”

To adapt, LaBerge said diversification is key. And one of the most promising pivots? LaBerge said high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence.

“Outside of mining, the pivot toward allocating power to HPC and AI is a big one,” he said. “It’s something we’re looking very hard at right now and a lot of our peers are as well.”

With a looming power crunch projected in 2026 and 2027, miners may be sitting on a hidden asset: energy. “You can argue [miners] have power at the exact right time where hyperscalers and others need it,” LaBerge noted.

Bitdeer is now exploring how to “shift some of our power into building and utilizing it for HPC and AI data centers,” which can then be leased to cloud service providers. “That’s going to allow us to generate a much more stable revenue stream,” he added. “The multiple people are going to pay on those types of revenues… is going to be much higher than Bitcoin mining.”