In an interview, Frank Holmes, the head of Canadian mining company HIVE Digital Technologies, announced an acceleration in the development of its artificial intelligence computing business. HIVE is one of the largest public miners and controls about 2% of the global Bitcoin hashrate.
According to Holmes, the share of AI in the company's revenue is expected to grow from roughly 10% to over 50% this year.
He noted that currently, ASIC miners bring in about $0.12–0.14 per hour, whereas a single Nvidia H100 graphics processing unit can earn nearly $2 per hour. Even older GPUs generate about $1.4 per hour, which is approximately ten times more than what mining equipment yields.
Many large miners, such as Riot Platforms, Cipher Digital, MARA, and TeraWulf, are minimizing losses by shifting from cryptocurrency mining to supporting AI computations in their data centers or combining these activities.
In early July, MARA Holdings, the largest miner in the U.S., purchased a data center site for AI and mining for $600 million. Back in November of last year, MARA CEO Fred Thiel stated that without Bitcoin's price increasing by at least 50% annually, the current mining model would become unprofitable.
The exact cost to mine one Bitcoin cannot be calculated precisely, but generally, according to various estimation models, it is around $78,000 for the summer of 2026. Bitcoin's price has remained below this level for several months, and some miners have begun switching off equipment as complexity increases due to rising costs.
end-content
