Public bitcoin miners are cutting their computational power faster than the overall network hash rate is declining—operators are increasingly redirecting electricity and data center infrastructure towards artificial intelligence and high-performance computing tasks. The sector is moving further away from pure cryptocurrency mining.
According to the latest issue of the Miner Weekly newsletter, consulting firm BlocksBridge Consulting reported that the realized hash rate of a group of major bitcoin miners fell from 368.3 EH/s in the fourth quarter of 2025 to 319 EH/s in the second quarter of 2026. This represents a 13.4% decline.
Bitdeer Stands Out from the Rest
The drop was even more noticeable if we exclude company Bitdeer from the calculation, which, unlike most competitors, continued to focus on mining. Excluding Bitdeer, the group's hash rate decreased by 21.2% over six months—from 324.6 EH/s to 255.9 EH/s. Bitdeer's own indicator, on the contrary, increased by 44% and reached 63 EH/s.
For comparison, the average hash rate of the entire bitcoin network decreased by 10.6% over the same period. Thus, large miners are cutting capacity significantly faster than the market as a whole.
Revenues Shifting Towards AI Infrastructure
These changes are occurring against the backdrop of more and more miners recording a growing share of revenue from areas not related to bitcoin mining. Core Scientific generated $136.7 million from capacity leasing in the second quarter, while mining brought the company only $27.5 million. TeraWulf reported $31.9 million in revenue from leasing capacity for HPC against $12.8 million from mining.
Riot Platforms and Bitdeer are currently at an earlier stage of transitioning to a different revenue model—bitcoin mining still provides the majority of their revenue based on the results of the last quarter.
Experts describe the current downturn as a reversal of the cycle that began after the ban on bitcoin mining in China in 2021. At that time, the ban triggered one of the sharpest declines in the network hash rate in history, followed by a rapid recovery—miners massively relocated equipment abroad.
In North America, this migration spurred the expansion of public miners: companies raised capital and acquired new sites with access to electricity to increase capacity. One halving cycle later, the business economics have changed dramatically. Weak mining profitability combined with growing demand for infrastructure to serve artificial intelligence since 2022 has pushed a number of public miners to completely repurpose sites and energy capacities for other tasks.
Thus, the statistics record a structural shift in the industry: some players are betting on diversifying their business through AI and HPC, while others, including Bitdeer and Riot Platforms, continue to scale up classic bitcoin mining.
AI Opinion
From a machine data analysis perspective, repurposing mining capacity for artificial intelligence tasks looks much less straightforward than hash rate statistics show. Mining data centers were initially designed for ASIC equipment with a different cooling and power consumption scheme than the graphics processing units required for neural networks. A similar problem of technological incompatibility has been discussed before: mining sites are practically unsuitable for neural networks due to different equipment requirements. It follows that the 13.4% decline in hash rate reflects not so much a completed business reorientation, but rather the beginning of a capital-intensive and time-consuming infrastructure restructuring.
The economics of such a restructuring are noticeably more stable than classic mining: contracts for leasing capacity for AI and HPC typically lock in revenue for years ahead, while income from bitcoin mining is entirely dependent on the price of the underlying asset. Whether the appeal of such a model will persist if demand for model training compute cools down is a question that the current hash rate statistics do not yet address.
