Public bitcoin miners are reducing their computing power significantly faster than the total hashrate of the entire network of the first cryptocurrency is decreasing. Operators are increasingly redirecting the electricity and infrastructure of their data centers to the tasks of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. According to the latest report by BlocksBridge Consulting, the realized hashrate of a group of large miners fell from three hundred and sixty-eight exahashes per second in the fourth quarter of two thousand twenty-fifth year to three hundred and nineteen exahashes in the second quarter of two thousand twenty-sixth year. The overall decrease was thirteen point four percent. For comparison, the average hashrate of the entire bitcoin network decreased by only ten and six tenths of a percent over the same period. Thus, large public miners are reducing their capacity significantly faster than the market as a whole.

The drop turned out to be even more significant if we exclude Bitdeer from the calculations, which continued to focus mainly on classic mining. Excluding this player, the hashrate of the group decreased by twenty-one point two percent in six months, while Bitdeer itself increased by forty-four percent and reached sixty-three exahashes per second. The changes are taking place against the background of the fact that more and more miners are recording an increase in the share of income from areas not related to cryptocurrency mining. Core Scientific received one hundred and thirty-six million dollars from the lease of facilities in the second quarter, while mining brought it only twenty-seven and a half million. TeraWulf reported revenue of thirty-one million dollars from the rental of high-performance computing facilities against twelve million from traditional mining. At the same time, Riot Platforms and Bitdeer are still at an earlier stage of transition, and bitcoin mining still provides the bulk of their revenue.

Experts describe the current downturn as a reversal of the cycle that began after the ban on mining in China in 2000. At that time, this ban triggered one of the sharpest drops in the hashrate in history, followed by a rapid recovery due to the massive migration of equipment abroad. In North America, this migration spurred the expansion of public miners, who actively raised capital to increase capacity. After one halving cycle, the business economy has changed dramatically. The weak profitability of mining, combined with the growing demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure, has pushed a number of companies to completely redesign their sites. However, rebuilding mining data centers for neural networks turned out to be a difficult process due to different hardware and cooling requirements. ASIC miners were originally designed for a completely different energy consumption scheme than graphics processors for training models. Therefore, the current decrease in the hashrate reflects not so much a ready-made business reorientation as the beginning of a capital-intensive restructuring of the infrastructure. The economy of this model is noticeably more stable than classical mining, since contracts for the lease of AI facilities usually fix revenue for years to come.

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The material has been prepared solely for informational purposes and does not constitute financial advice or recommendation.