WGMI's 80% mandate now runs from bitcoin miners to AI power

CoinShares has rewritten the mandate of WGMI, its bitcoin mining ETF. The fund must now keep at least 80% of net assets in bitcoin mining and digital power companies — a universe the prospectus stretches to include hyperscale data centers, chip suppliers, power generation and storage, and high-performance and quantum computing outfits tied to AI. The description comes from a CoinShares report carried by ETF Trends.

Bitcoin miners spent a decade building power-dense sites with high-voltage connections and cooling. Those sites now look like scarce real estate to companies chasing data center capacity. The mandate change codifies a shift already visible inside the portfolio. The International Energy Agency expects global data center electricity use to roughly double by 2030, from 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 950, with AI the largest driver. CoinShares' case is that chips have stopped being the bottleneck; energized land is, and it takes years to permit and build.

Miners have announced more than $70 billion in cumulative AI and high-performance computing contracts, the report says. Core Scientific signed hosting agreements with CoreWeave that run 12 years. The total contract value is $10.2 billion. IREN landed an AI cloud contract with Microsoft in Texas that will run five years. The contract is valued at $9.7 billion. Hut 8 leased its Beacon Point campus in Texas for 15 years. The lease carries a $9.8 billion valuation.

TeraWulf marks the inflection point. In the first quarter of 2026, its AI hosting revenue overtook its bitcoin mining income for the first time. That is a full reversal of the business model that put it in WGMI.

The new 80% policy makes WGMI a hybrid. The eligible list, once limited to bitcoin miners, now takes in companies that build, power, and cool the AI economy, with up to 20% of assets still allowed in broader bitcoin plays. The fund carries two distinct trades: the bitcoin price and the data center build-out.

The risks have doubled as well. The report is explicit that mining stocks remain leveraged to bitcoin and can fall harder than the coin in downturns. Layered on top is AI hosting risk: revenue concentrated in a few large customers and execution risk on construction schedules spanning years. A fund that used to follow one commodity cycle now follows a commodity plus an infrastructure-spending cycle.

The report gives no flow figures, so the market's verdict on the new mandate is still out. The exposure shift has consequences regardless: WGMI's tracking, sector classification, and volatility are likely to move as much on hyperscaler capital spending and power prices as on hash rate. Investors who bought a bitcoin proxy have picked up a position in the AI power race; the ETF wrapper is how that trade arrives.

The move fits a pattern in the crypto ETF complex. Earlier this week, Bitwise's Trendwise ETFs abandoned long-only crypto for a moving-average rotation between crypto and Treasuries, ETF Daily reports. WGMI's mandate change is a different answer to the same pressure: when the industry underneath the ticker repurposes itself, the wrapper has to decide what it actually tracks.