Publicly traded bitcoin miners cut their realized hashrate by 13.4% between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026, according to BlocksBridge Consulting's Miner Weekly newsletter, as operators redirect power and data-center capacity away from bitcoin toward AI and high-performance computing workloads. The tracked cohort's combined realized hashrate fell from 368.3 exahashes per second to 319 EH/s over the six-month stretch — a steeper decline than the Bitcoin network's own 10.6% hashrate drop over the same period.
The pullback isn't evenly distributed. Excluding Bitdeer, which kept expanding its mining footprint, the rest of the public-miner cohort shed 21.2% of realized hashrate, sliding from 324.6 EH/s to 255.9 EH/s. Bitdeer moved the opposite direction, growing its own realized hashrate 44% to 63 EH/s, underscoring how unevenly the industry is splitting between operators doubling down on mining and those pivoting toward AI leases.
Where the revenue is actually coming from
The shift shows up clearly in company financials. Core Scientific posted $136.7 million in colocation revenue for the second quarter against just $27.5 million from mining, while TeraWulf logged $31.9 million in HPC lease revenue versus $12.8 million from mining — in both cases, hosting AI compute now dwarfs the bitcoin-mining business that built the companies. Riot Platforms and Bitdeer are the exceptions, with mining still representing the majority of their revenue.
Why the economics stopped favoring bitcoin
The pivot traces back to the April 2024 halving, which cut mining rewards and set off a slow repricing of the business, but the scale of the AI buildout accelerated sharply through 2025 and into 2026. Several major miners have now signed multibillion-dollar AI hosting agreements — Hut 8's contracted AI portfolio alone has reportedly reached $26.6 billion — making a 15-year fixed-rate AI lease look far more attractive to institutional operators than committing the same megawatt of power to bitcoin mining's volatile block rewards.
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Public miners have also been selling down their bitcoin treasuries to fund the transition, offloading more than 32,000 BTC in the first quarter of 2026 alone — more than they sold in all of 2025 combined, and more than the roughly 20,000 BTC public miners sold during the 2022 Terra/Luna collapse. Even so, mining equities have outperformed bitcoin itself this year, with a basket of miner stocks up 56% in early 2026 while bitcoin fell 17% over the same stretch, as investors increasingly price these companies as energy infrastructure plays rather than pure bitcoin proxies.
