Public Bitcoin Miners Cut Hashrate 13.4% as AI Compute Takes Over

Public Miners Retreat From Bitcoin as AI Deals Reshape the Cohort

A group of listed Bitcoin mining companies has quietly pulled the equivalent of a small country’s compute power off the Bitcoin network. According to research firm BlocksBridge Consulting, the realized hashrate of publicly traded miners dropped 13.4% between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026, as operators diverted power and data centre capacity toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing tenants.

The retreat marks the sharpest sustained pullback from public miners since the 2022 downturn, and it comes even as institutional buyers keep loading up on spot Bitcoin ETFs. The gap between where the mining industry earns its money and where it commits its next dollar of capex is widening fast.

Track crypto market prices through the shift to see how the split plays out in real time.

Hashrate Falls From 368 EH/s to 319 EH/s Across the Cohort

The BlocksBridge Miner Weekly report puts the numbers in stark terms. The combined realized hashrate of the public miner cohort slid from 368.3 exahashes per second (EH/s) in Q4 2025 to 319 EH/s in Q2 2026, per data cited by Cointelegraph.

Strip out one outlier and the picture is worse. Excluding Bitdeer, the remaining cohort shed 21.2% over the same six-month window, falling from 324.6 EH/s to 255.9 EH/s. The Bitcoin network as a whole is down 10.6% over the period, meaning private and offshore miners have not fully filled the gap left by the listed names.

Core Scientific Earns Five Times More From AI Than Bitcoin Mining

The clearest illustration sits inside Core Scientific’s Q2 books. The Texas-based operator pulled in $136.7 million in colocation revenue during the second quarter, compared with $27.5 million from Bitcoin mining. That is nearly a fivefold gap between what its power sells for when it hosts AI compute and what the same power earns when it hashes for block rewards.

TeraWulf tells a similar story. The company reported $31.9 million in HPC lease revenue, compared with $12.8 million from Bitcoin mining, in the same quarter. Riot Platforms and Bitdeer remain more mining-heavy in their revenue mix, but Riot has already signalled its own pivot: earlier this week, the stock jumped 25% after hours on the strength of a $9.1 billion AI compute agreement with Anthropic.

What Hashrate Really Measures, and Why the Drop Matters

For newer readers, hashrate is the total computing power the network throws at solving each Bitcoin block. Every miner racing to guess the correct number adds to the count, and the higher the total, the more expensive it becomes for any single attacker to try to rewrite recent transactions. In that sense, hashrate is both a security metric and an economic one.

A 10% fall in network hashrate does not put Bitcoin at risk on its own, since the network is still running at close to a zettahash per second. It does, however, tell you where the private sector thinks the marginal dollar of electricity earns the best return. Right now, that answer is not Bitcoin.

Bitdeer Bucks the Trend With a 44% Hashrate Push

Bitdeer went the other way. The Singapore-headquartered miner grew its realised hashrate by 44% to 63 EH/s over the same period, betting that a leaner cost base can still make block-reward mining profitable at current prices. Its share of the public cohort’s hashrate has now roughly doubled, giving the company outsized weight in every industry report.

The Bitdeer counterpoint matters because it forces a more careful reading of the headline number. The industry is not uniformly walking away from Bitcoin. Instead, capital is concentrating with the lowest-cost operator while everyone else looks for a second revenue line.

For traders following the flow, live BTC price charts will show whether Bitcoin’s own price action starts to reward the operators still leaning in.

Whether Miners Return to Bitcoin Could Depend on Post-Halving Economics

The next question is whether any of this reverses. Analysts note that Bitcoin’s production cost sat near $90,000 earlier in the year while spot prices spent long stretches well below that figure, squeezing miner margins hard, according to a Q1 assessment from CoinDesk. If Bitcoin rallies into a higher trading range and network difficulty falls further, mining economics could improve enough to lure some capacity back.

There are conditions attached. The AI hosting contracts that miners are signing tend to be multi-year commitments with sizeable capital outlays for cooling and networking. Those sites cannot flip back to mining on short notice, even if the block-reward math swings the other way. Any recovery in listed miner hashrate may therefore lag any recovery in Bitcoin’s price by several quarters. Traders can follow the shift alongside the latest crypto news to time their own moves.

The Line Between a Bitcoin Miner and an AI Data Centre Is Fading Fast

The bigger story is what these companies are becoming. A listed Bitcoin miner that earns five times more from colocation than from mining, on power contracts originally built for hashing, is not really a Bitcoin miner in the classic sense anymore. It is a specialty data-centre operator with a legacy mining line.

That reclassification is happening in equity markets before it lands in press releases. Analysts covering the sector are increasingly pricing these names on colocation multiples rather than on mining ones, and the market-cap distance between AI-leaning miners and pure-play miners keeps widening. Bitcoin’s security ends up quietly outsourced to whichever operators still find the block-reward math the most attractive line on the P&L, while the rest chase the demand that pays best today.