Bureaucracy has become a restraining factor for the development of data centers in the U.S., and bitcoin miners are among the main beneficiaries of this situation, according to investment company CoinShares. Its review states that this topic is underappreciated by the market. Miners are relying less and less on cryptocurrency mining, moving into more profitable business.
The demand for capacity in American data centers is huge, and the share of unused capacity has decreased from 10% in 2019 to about 1% today. Analysts note that this indicator has remained at the same level for the third year in a row.
Moratoriums and restrictions on the construction of new facilities have reached a record level, and the capacity awaiting connection to the power grid is about 2060 GW, the report's authors write. This is 1.6 times the total capacity of all existing U.S. power plants, which is about 1300 GW.
Considering that it takes an average of about five years to connect a new facility to the power grid, data centers already connected to the grid have a significant price premium, analysts point out. According to them, miners already own the infrastructure to host data centers and face no regulatory obstacles to repurposing capacity for artificial intelligence.
"Therefore, we are seeing the share of AI revenue in the mining sector grow from 30% to, by our estimates, 70% by the end of the year, and possibly higher," CoinShares wrote.
In the first half of the year, major public miners cut more than 20% of their capacity for AI. Bitcoin mining was reduced by Core Scientific, IREN, Cipher Digital, TeraWulf, and Keel Infrastructure (formerly Bitfarms).
Some of them have already reached CoinShares' forecast. In the second quarter of 2026, revenue from leasing high-performance computing platforms accounted for 71% at TeraWulf and 83% at Core Scientific. The rest of the sector is at an earlier stage of transition.
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