Publicly traded bitcoin miners are shedding mining capacity faster than the network as a whole, a sign that more operators are steering electricity and data center space toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing work.
Hashrate declines outpace the network
BlocksBridge Consulting reported in its latest Miner Weekly newsletter that realized hashrate across a cohort of public miners fell from 368.3 exahashes per second (EH/s) in the fourth quarter of 2025 to 319 EH/s in the second quarter of 2026, a drop of 13.4%.
Strip out Bitdeer, which kept expanding, and the picture looks worse: the remaining cohort shed 21.2% over six months, sliding from 324.6 EH/s to 255.9 EH/s.
Bitdeer went the other way, growing its realized hashrate 44% to 63 EH/s.
By comparison, the Bitcoin network’s average hashrate fell 10.6% over the same stretch.
Non-mining revenue takes the lead
Core Scientific pulled in $136.7 million in colocation revenue during the second quarter, dwarfing the $27.5 million it earned from bitcoin mining.
TeraWulf posted $31.9 million in HPC lease revenue against $12.8 million from mining.
Riot Platforms and Bitdeer remain earlier in that transition, with mining still accounting for the bulk of their most recent quarterly revenue.
Unwinding the post-China boom
BlocksBridge described the pullback as the unwinding of the expansion cycle that followed China’s 2021 mining ban, which sparked a sharp hashrate collapse before miners relocated abroad and rebuilt.
That migration fueled a North American buildout, with public miners raising capital and buying up power sites.
One halving cycle later, thinner margins and booming AI infrastructure demand have pushed several operators to repurpose sites and power capacity away from bitcoin mining entirely.
