AI-linked Bitcoin miners are up 21% this year while pure-play miners are down 8%, as Core Scientific and MARA sell BTC and hashrate suffers its deepest drop since 2021.
Bitcoin miners are being repriced as something other than Bitcoin miners. Companies with artificial intelligence infrastructure businesses are up 21% year to date, while miners without one are down 8%, according to data from CryptoQuant.
The market is paying for power, grid access and data center facilities, the same assets AI and high-performance computing (HPC) firms need to run their chips. For miners that own those assets, Bitcoin is becoming one use for them rather than the whole business.
The shift shows up in three places: share prices, company treasuries and the Bitcoin network itself.
For most of their history, listed Bitcoin miners traded as a leveraged bet on the price of Bitcoin. When BTC rose, miners rose faster. When it fell, they fell harder.
That link is breaking. As per a CryptoQuant report, the 29-point gap between AI-linked and pure-play miners this year reflects a different way of valuing them. It added,
"Power, grid access, and facilities are becoming the new edge."
The logic is straightforward. A miner has already secured what AI builders struggle to find: large power contracts, grid connections, and buildings wired to run thousands of machines. Leasing that capacity to AI customers can produce steadier revenue than mining, which rises and falls with Bitcoin's price and the network's difficulty.
The pivot is visible in how miners manage their Bitcoin. Rather than holding what they mine, several are selling to fund the move into AI.
Core Scientific sold around 3,136 BTC for roughly $271 million so far this year, as per CryptoQuant. More than 90% of its Bitcoin treasury is now gone. At those figures, the company sold at an average of about $86,400 per coin.
MARA, one of the largest listed miners, shows a similar pattern. Addresses CryptoQuant tracks show at least 5,203 BTC sold, while the company's filings show 23,093 BTC sold for $1.63 billion in the first half of 2026 alone, according to CryptoQuant.
The gap between those two MARA figures is worth explaining. On-chain tracking only captures wallets that analysts have linked to a company, so it tends to understate the total. Company filings give the fuller picture, and in MARA's case they show far heavier selling than the tracked wallets alone.
The clearest sign of the shift is in the network's computing power. Hashrate measures the total computing power securing Bitcoin, counted here in exahashes per second (EH/s).
Bitcoin's true hashrate peaked at about 1,101 EH/s in November 2025, then fell to about 899 EH/s on 6 August 2026, according to CryptoQuant. That is an 18.3% drawdown, the deepest since China banned Bitcoin mining in 2021.
The difference is the cause. In 2021, miners were forced offline and relocated. This time, at least part of the decline reflects miners choosing to point their power at AI instead.
Hashrate has since recovered to about 934 EH/s, but it remains well below the peak, according to CryptoQuant.
A lower hashrate is not automatically a weakness. Bitcoin adjusts its mining difficulty every two weeks, so when some miners leave, those who stay earn a larger share of rewards. The network keeps producing blocks on schedule.
The bigger change is in who mines. As listed companies reallocate capital toward AI, a growing share of Bitcoin's security may come from operators still committed to mining alone. Miner selling also adds supply to the market, even as Bitcoin trades near an eight-month high above $85,000. As per Cryptoquant,
"Some miners are no longer just scaling Bitcoin mining…They're reallocating capital and infrastructure toward AI/HPC."
The metric to watch is whether hashrate climbs back toward its peak. If it does, the AI shift is running alongside mining growth. If it stalls, more of the industry's power is heading somewhere other than Bitcoin.
No comments yet
Be the first to share your take when accounts launch.
