Yesterday we entered a BTC long at $66k and took a stab at ETH too. As of right now we’re sitting at $67k — a small scalp, but we’re still holding. Nothing wild yet.
What’s been on my mind though is something bigger than the trade. Bitcoin is sitting 50% below its all-time high, and nobody seems to care. I don’t hear people talking about it anymore. No hype at dinner tables, no taxi drivers asking how to buy crypto. Even Crypto Twitter has quietly pivoted — it’s all AI agents, AI tokens, AI everything.
Turns out, Bitcoin miners are thinking the exact same thing.
The Math Broke Down
There’s one number that explains everything happening right now: $79,995.
That’s what the average publicly listed miner spent to produce a single Bitcoin in Q4 2025, according to CoinShares’ Q1 2026 mining report. Bitcoin’s price? Hovering around $66,000 to $70,000.
That’s a loss of roughly $19,000 on every single coin mined.
This isn’t a temporary blip. The April 2024 halving cut block rewards to 3.125 BTC per block. Energy costs stayed high. Competition didn’t disappear. The result was an industry quietly bleeding cash, quarter after quarter.
Bitfarms CEO Ben Gagnon said it out loud earlier this year: “We are no longer a Bitcoin company.”
Most miners aren’t being that blunt. But their balance sheets are telling the same story.
Where the Money Is Going Instead
Bitcoin miners own something valuable that has nothing to do with BTC: infrastructure.
Massive data centers. Cheap electricity contracts. Engineering teams who understand power-dense computing at scale.
AI companies desperately need exactly that.
The result is a wave of deals that would have sounded absurd three years ago. More than $70 billion in AI and high-performance computing (HPC) contracts have now been signed across the publicly listed mining sector. These aren’t exploratory partnerships — they’re decade-long commitments.
Here’s what the major players have locked in:
- Core Scientific — $10.2 billion, 12-year deal with CoreWeave. Selling BTC to fund it.
- TeraWulf — $12.8 billion in contracted HPC revenue. Pivoting infrastructure.
- Hut 8 — $7 billion, 15-year AI data center lease. Selling BTC.
- Bitdeer — Sold its entire BTC treasury to zero. Expanding AI data center capacity.
- IREN — $3.6 billion in GPU financing tied to a Microsoft deal. Holds zero BTC.
- Bitfarms — Full infrastructure repositioning. Actively selling BTC.
Core Scientific alone sold around 1,900 BTC — roughly $175 million — in January 2026. Bitdeer cleared its entire treasury in February. Riot sold 1,818 BTC in December. Even Marathon, the largest public Bitcoin holder with 53,822 BTC, quietly expanded its policy in March to allow balance sheet sales.
How They’re Paying for the Pivot
Repurposing a data center for AI isn’t cheap. Different hardware. Upgraded power delivery. New cooling systems.
The capital has to come from somewhere. It’s coming from two places: debt and Bitcoin sales.
- IREN now carries $3.7 billion in convertible notes.
- TeraWulf holds $5.7 billion in total debt.
- Cipher Digital issued $1.7 billion in senior secured notes in November 2025 — its quarterly interest expense jumped from $3.2 million to $33.4 million in a single quarter.
Collectively, publicly listed miners have sold more than 15,000 BTC from their peak treasury holdings.
That’s real supply hitting the market. And it’s one reason analysts are watching this sector closely while Bitcoin is already under pressure in 2026.
Why this matters for BTC price: Miners are historically some of the most significant BTC sellers. When they’re liquidating treasuries to fund AI transitions on top of selling newly mined coins, supply pressure increases. That’s not the only factor in Bitcoin’s current slide — but it’s a real one.
Wall Street Loves the New Story
Markets are signaling clearly which version of these companies they prefer.
Miners with secured AI contracts now trade at 12.3x forward sales. Pure-play Bitcoin miners trade at just 5.9x.
The market is paying more than double for the AI exposure. And that valuation gap is accelerating the very pivot it’s rewarding.
It’s a feedback loop. AI deals unlock better valuations. Better valuations make it easier to raise capital. Easier capital funds more AI deals.
Related: Check why Bittensor is our favourite AI coin right now.
Is This Bad for Bitcoin?
The honest answer: it depends who you ask.
The concern: Mining difficulty dropped 7.76% on March 21 — the second-largest downward adjustment of 2026. Fewer machines mining means the theoretical cost of a network attack decreases, at least temporarily. The U.S., China, and Russia already control about 68% of global hashrate. If U.S. miners keep leaving, that concentration could shift toward less transparent jurisdictions.
The counter: Bitcoin was designed for exactly this. Its difficulty adjustment algorithm automatically recalibrates to keep block times near 10 minutes. It’s done this through every bear market, every miner exodus, every political crackdown. Other operators will buy abandoned ASICs. New entrants from Paraguay, Ethiopia, and Oman are already entering the global top-10 hashrate rankings. The network keeps producing blocks regardless.
CoinShares projects hashrate will recover to 1.8 zetahashes by end of 2026 — but only if Bitcoin climbs back toward $100,000. That’s the central tension for the rest of this year.
What Happens Next
The mining industry’s identity is fracturing. Some companies will complete the transformation into AI data center operators that mine Bitcoin only incidentally. Others will hold the line and absorb the market share left behind.
Marathon still holds 53,822 BTC and remains one of the few large miners explicitly committed to the original model. CleanSpark treats its 13,513 BTC as productive capital — not something to liquidate. Institutional operators backed by BlackRock and sovereign wealth funds tend to hold Bitcoin-specific mandates. They’re not pivoting anywhere.
The question isn’t whether some miners will become AI companies. That’s already happened.
The question is what’s left on the other side — and whether Bitcoin’s price recovers fast enough to make mining profitable again before the pivot becomes permanent.
If BTC returns to $100,000, everything changes. If it doesn’t, more miners follow the exits.
My Take — This Feels Like a Bottom Signal
I’ve been in Bitcoin since 2013. Bought my first coins at $44. I’ve mined, traded, survived hacks, and built companies in this space. I’ve seen a lot of cycles.
And here’s what I’ve learned: the best time to get interested is when everyone else is walking away.
Remember when every public company was rushing to add Bitcoin to their treasury? MicroStrategy clones popping up everywhere, boardrooms suddenly “getting” crypto? That made me nervous. That’s the kind of behavior you see near tops — when the narrative is so strong that even people with no business being in crypto start piling in.
This is the opposite. Miners are pivoting to AI. Crypto Twitter is talking about AI agents. Nobody at dinner is asking me how to buy Bitcoin anymore. The interest has quietly evaporated.
To me? That’s not a red flag. That’s a green one.
I’m not saying the bottom is in today. But when the crowd rotates away from an asset — especially one with Bitcoin’s fundamentals — it tends to set up the next entry. We’ll do a full breakdown of bottom signals in a future post. But the miner exodus? That goes on the list. This is why we emphasize a DCA strategy in our trading blogs.
Bitcoin miners built the infrastructure to power the world’s most resilient financial network. Some of them are now pointing that infrastructure at AI instead. That’s their call to make.
Mine’s to keep buying when nobody else wants to.
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The Bottom Line
Bitcoin miners built the infrastructure to power the world’s most resilient financial network. Now they’re discovering that same infrastructure is worth even more to power AI.
That’s not a betrayal of Bitcoin. It’s a market responding to incentives — exactly the way Bitcoin’s own design assumes all participants will.
But the companies you once knew as Bitcoin miners are becoming something new. The logos might stay the same. The business underneath is changing fast.
One Last Thing — My Solo Miner Setup
On a completely different scale: I run a small solo miner at home, and I’m not pivoting to AI!
I’m not deluding myself. If I pool-mined with this hash power, I’d make maybe $10–$12 a month. Not exactly life-changing. So instead, I’m solo mining — which basically means I’m playing the lottery. The jackpot is 3.125 BTC per block. The odds of hitting it with my setup? Astronomical.
Pray for me.
But honestly? That’s not really the point. There’s something that feels right about contributing to the network, even in a tiny way. Every little bit of hash power helps secure the chain. And beyond that — it just sits on my desk humming away. Coolest desk accessory I’ve ever owned.
While the big miners are signing billion-dollar AI deals and selling off their BTC, I’ll be over here pointing my small miner at the sky, hoping to hit a block. Someone has to do it.
If you enjoyed this blog, check out our recent blog on crypto-backed mortgages
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