The same company started running on a different clock
IREN was a bitcoin miner. In the coin winter of 2022 the stock fell as far as -92.3%, and the coin price was its fate. Then the company turned its mining sites, the power contracts and the land, into an NVIDIA GPU cloud, and the returns read +472% in 2023 and +284.6% in 2025. The land and the power stayed the same; what moved the stock changed from coin prices to AI compute demand. This piece has one thesis. A company that sat outside or on the edge of the chain can swap clocks by turning its physical assets, power contracts, land, cooling and network operations, into AI infrastructure. Dependence does not change your clock; conversion does.
The miners' conversion: from a coin clock to a compute clock
Miners are the purest case. In November 2025 IREN signed a five-year, $9.7 billion GB300 GPU cloud contract with Microsoft and is converting its 750MW Childress campus in Texas into liquid-cooled data centers. TeraWulf bottomed at -95.5% in 2022, then rose four years straight: +258.2% in 2023, +135.8% in 2024, +103% in 2025 and +76.2% in 2026. Behind that run sits a 25-year lease with Fluidstack, with Google backstopping $1.3 billion of the obligations. Core Scientific is +63% in 2026, anchored by a 12-year contract to supply CoreWeave with 590MW of infrastructure, worth a cumulative $10.2 billion. What these three actually owned was cheap contracted power and sites that could carry heavy cooling, and that is precisely what AI data centers want.
The telco's conversion: expectation outweighed the accident
SK Telecom's core telecom business is the archetype of high dividends and low volatility; from 2021 to 2024 its annual returns ranged between -12% and +15.8%. Then it layered an AI infrastructure story on top: GPU-as-a-service running NVIDIA H100s and H200s, the first in Korea; the SK Group AI Factory with more than 50,000 NVIDIA GPUs; a 1GW-class AI data center in Ulsan; and an HBM alliance with SK hynix. The stock returned +37.5% in 2025. The decisive scene came that same year. A massive SIM hacking incident cut roughly 800 billion won of revenue, dragging FY2025 sales down to 17.1 trillion won (-4.7%), and the stock still rose. The market weighed the conversion more heavily than the accident.
The search company's conversion: Yandex's legacy became GPU clusters
Nebius was carved out of the old Yandex assets and reborn as a company that rents out large NVIDIA GPU clusters. It signed a $17.4 to 19.4 billion contract with Microsoft, and NVIDIA invested. The returns: +202.2% in 2025 and +133.2% in 2026. The data center operating skill inherited from the search business was the seed capital of the conversion.
Where conversion ends
Two counterexamples draw the line. First, dependence. Netflix and Airbnb run their entire infrastructure on AWS; measured by depth of dependence, few go deeper. Yet in 2026 Netflix is -18.8% and Airbnb +9.6%, still on the subscription and travel clocks. Second, money alone. Oracle funds the roughly $300 billion Stargate project with OpenAI, yet sits at -26.9% in 2026. The companies the market credited with conversion shared one currency beyond contracts or stakes: physical assets, meaning power, land and operating capability.
The price of conversion: volatility and the speed of proof
Conversion comes at a cost. IREN's -92.3% in 2022 is the evidence of how far volatility in this group can go. And the speed at which the story turns into revenue is the next thing to verify. TeraWulf's quarterly revenue is about $50 million and Core Scientific's colocation revenue about $10.6 million a quarter, early days against contracts measured in the billions. This is a stretch where contracts have to be watched turning into utilization and cash.
Verification verdict
Miners (IREN +284.6% in 2025, TeraWulf up four years straight), a telco (SK Telecom +37.5%) and a search company (Nebius +202.2%) all swapped clocks the same way. On the other side, Netflix (-18.8%), which depends entirely on AWS, and Oracle (-26.9%), which funds Stargate, stayed on their original business clocks. What divided the clocks was less a company's position inside or outside the chain than whether it became AI infrastructure, and the ticket was physical assets: power, land and operating capability. The clock layout of the entire chain continues in Many Clocks.