THE MINING POD: Bitcoin Mining Capital Markets and the AI Bottleneck w/ Christian Lopez
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 29 April 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How valuable are bitcoin miners to hyperscalers? Christian Lopez answers the question and breaks down the current landscape of bitcoin mining capital markets.
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Welcome to The Mining Pod! Today, Christian Lopez, Head of Digital Assets at Cohen and Company Capital Markets, joins us to break down Bitcoin mining's ever-shifting capital market landscape. Lopez explains why there's currently a glut of mining sites on the market, why private miners struggle to secure funding, and why the HPC/AI retrofit narrative is more complex than it seems. We also discuss how potential tariffs might affect mining operations, why Bitcoin mining stocks are correlating differently with Bitcoin than in previous cycles, and the evolving relationship between Bitcoin miners and institutional investors.
- 1.5GW of mining sites currently for sale
- Private miners face nearly impossible fundraising
- Site retrofits for HPC require total rebuilds
- Hash rate correlation with BTC price declining
- Tariffs may increase CapEx by 10-30%
- Hyperscalers want 150MW+ sites near major cities
Timestamps:
00:00 Start
01:47 Current market for miners
04:22 M&A landscape
11:42 Fractal
12:04 AI & HPC hype
14:27 Raising capital right now
17:59 Is retrofitting real?
21:36 Tariffs
26:16 Is capital chasing AI instead of mining?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What's up y'all? Welcome back to the mining pod. For this week's show, we have Christian Lopez, the head of digital assets at Cohen & Company Capital Markets. |
| 0:09.0 | Cohen and Company is an investment bank with a blockchain and digital asset arm that has been behind deals like the stronghold BitFarms merger and folds public listing. |
| 0:18.8 | So for this show, I tap Christian's wealth of knowledge on capital markets |
| 0:23.0 | for Bitcoin miners specifically. And we talk about everything from the fact that there is a glut |
| 0:27.8 | of assets on the market currently and what AI and HPC actually means for Bitcoin miners and where |
| 0:34.9 | the opportunities lie versus where people think they do. |
| 0:38.1 | I hope you all enjoy this conversation. |
| 0:39.6 | This has been one of my favorites so far this year. |
| 0:41.5 | Christian is really, really sharp on all of this. |
| 0:44.2 | So enjoy this conversation, y'all. |
| 0:45.9 | Today's show is brought to you by Fractal Bitcoin, but we'll learn more about them later in the show. |
| 0:50.4 | For now, let's get right into it. |
| 0:58.0 | Christian Lopez. Welcome to the mining pod, man. How you doing? Hey, gone. Good, man. Good to be here. Thanks for having me on. |
| 1:02.0 | Yeah, absolutely. It was really excited for this one. I think it's going to be a great show. |
| 1:06.0 | There's been a lot of news around mergers and acquisitions this year. |
| 1:11.2 | Obviously, last year, there was a lot of news with some of these convert deals that some of these big Bitcoin miners were doing. |
| 1:17.1 | It seems like the capital market scene just continues to mature for Bitcoin miners and Bitcoin companies in general. |
| 1:23.0 | So to set the stage for our conversation, speaking specifically to Bitcoin mining, could you |
| 1:28.0 | kind of give us a high-level overview of where the market is at right now? |
| 1:32.4 | Yeah. Yeah, there was, there's obviously a massive amount of interest from the miners |
| 1:38.8 | and investors around, you know, Bitcoin and the converts on the back of the success of micro strategy. |
| 1:46.9 | You know, micro strategy went out and it really has to do with like the depth of the capital |
... |
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