Key facts
- Public Bitcoin miners' realized hashrate decreased by 13.4% between Q4 2025 and Q2 2026.
- Excluding Bitdeer, the hashrate drop for public miners was 21.2%.
- Bitdeer saw a 44% increase in its realized hashrate.
- Core Scientific and TeraWulf are increasingly earning revenue from AI and HPC infrastructure.
- Core Scientific's Q2 colocation revenue surpassed its Bitcoin mining revenue.
Publicly traded Bitcoin miners are significantly reducing their mining capacity, with a cohort seeing a 13.4% drop in realized hashrate between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026. This contraction is more pronounced when excluding Bitdeer, which continued to expand its operations, showing a 44% increase in hashrate. The broader Bitcoin network's hashrate declined by 10.6% over the same period.
The shift is driven by evolving economics, with miners increasingly repurposing power and infrastructure for data centers and high-performance computing (HPC). Companies like Core Scientific and TeraWulf are now generating the majority of their revenue from these non-mining activities. Core Scientific reported $136.7 million in colocation revenue in the second quarter, far exceeding its $27.5 million from Bitcoin mining. Similarly, TeraWulf earned $31.9 million from HPC leases, compared to $12.8 million from mining.
This trend is seen as an unwinding of the expansion cycle that followed China's 2021 mining ban. The increased demand for AI infrastructure since 2022, coupled with weaker mining profitability post-halving, has prompted several public miners to pivot away from Bitcoin mining.