Bitcoin Miners Rebalance as AI Returns Outpace Mining

Bitcoin news Today: Hash price for Bitcoin mining fell to approximately $29 to $30 per petahash per second per day in early Q1 2026, down from roughly $36 to $38 in Q4 2025, according to CoinShares’ Q1 2026 Bitcoin Mining Report. The report says listed miners could derive as much as 70% of revenue from artificial intelligence infrastructure by the end of 2026, up from roughly 30% today. It also puts the weighted-average cash cost of producing one bitcoin among publicly listed miners at approximately $79,995 in Q4 2025.

The pressure on mining is increasingly a question of competing uses for scarce electricity, rack space, and capital. CoinShares says AI infrastructure offers higher and more stable returns while hash prices remain near cyclical lows.

This gives miners with scalable energy access and existing data-center capabilities an economic reason to redirect resources toward high-performance computing.

That does not necessarily describe a broad retreat from US mining infrastructure. CoinShares says the US share of global hash rate rose by roughly two percentage points quarter over quarter.

Its analysis instead points to a changing mix of activity: some listed miners are expanding AI capacity while mining remains an important, though increasingly pressured, part of their operations.

Bitcoin Miners’ AI Pivot: Why the Infrastructure Math Favors Data Centers

AI is competing with Bitcoin mining for rack space, a dynamic that could push mining toward more intermittent and cheaper power sources over time. Listed miners have announced more than $70 billion in cumulative AI and high-performance computing contracts. The cost differential is substantial: Bitcoin mining infrastructure costs roughly $700,000 to $1 million per megawatt, compared with approximately $8 million to $15 million per megawatt for AI infrastructure.

Several companies illustrate the scale of the shift. Core Scientific has about 350 megawatts energized for HPC, with roughly 200 megawatts billed, and its CoreWeave contract was expanded to $10.2 billion over 12 years. TeraWulf has 39 megawatts of critical IT capacity online at Lake Mariner and $12.8 billion in contracted HPC revenue. IREN has scaled to more than 10,900 Nvidia GPUs, while Hut 8 signed a $7 billion, 15-year Fluidstack lease for 245 megawatts at its River Bend campus.

AI and HPC revenue contributions remain in their early stages but are growing. CoinShares reports that AI/HPC colocation accounted for 39% of Core Scientific’s Q4 revenue, while TeraWulf’s HPC business represented 27%. IREN’s AI Cloud segment contributed 9%, and HIVE’s HPC business accounted for 5%.

The transition is not uniform. CoinShares identifies IREN and Bitfarms as companies repositioning as HPC providers while using mining as a bridge. CleanSpark continues to prioritize near-term mining while building AI exposure. Marathon, meanwhile, has deployed smaller, localized containerized sites of roughly 10 megawatts that are suited to intermittent power.

Mining can tolerate interruptions incompatible with AI workloads that require near-continuous uptime.

Bitcoin News Today: A Five-Year Low in Hash Price

CoinShares called Q4 2025 the toughest quarter for miners since the April 2024 halving. A sharp bitcoin price correction, near-record hash rate, and three consecutive negative difficulty adjustments (the first such streak since July 2022) compressed hash prices. The decline continued into Q1 2026, briefly touching $28 per PH/s per day in late February before recovering to the $30–$35 range.

CoinShares expects further capitulation among higher-cost miners in H1 2026 unless bitcoin recovers. Mid-generation hardware needs sub-5-cent power to stay profitable, while newer fleets below 15 J/TH retain healthier margins at typical industrial rates.

The report also flags a distortion risk: AI/HPC buildouts can skew per-bitcoin cost figures for hybrid operators, as debt, overhead, and depreciation tied to AI infrastructure get allocated against a shrinking bitcoin output. This blurs the line between mining economics and data-center economics.

Core Scientific’s failed merger with CoreWeave, rejected by shareholders on October 30, 2025, highlights this tension. CoinShares notes the company later restated financials after assets slated for demolition during HPC conversion were improperly capitalized, underscoring the accounting complexity of such transitions.

Bitcoin News Today: Bull and Bear Paths for Hash Price

In the latest Bitcoin news today, CoinShares says a sustained recovery above $40 per PH/s per day would require Bitcoin to rally toward $100,000 by the end of 2026. A pace that outstrips continued hash-rate growth.

Its report also says that if bitcoin prices remain below $80,000 for the rest of the year, the hash price could continue to fall if difficulty continues to rise, though additional rig shutdowns could reduce the hash rate and flatten the result.

The report treats the durability of the AI pivot as an open question. Mining remains highly sensitive to bitcoin’s price, and a meaningful recovery in profitability could lead some operators to reassess how they allocate capital between hash power and compute infrastructure. CoinShares characterizes the present shift as a function of relative returns rather than necessarily a permanent transition.

Flexible power arrangements and low-cost, intermittent energy may remain particularly relevant for mining operators whose facilities are not suited to AI workloads.