Bitcoin miners are increasingly looking beyond traditional mining as artificial intelligence infrastructure delivers more attractive returns, according to CoinShares. The shift is putting additional pressure on mining margins even though the U.S. continues to increase its share of global Bitcoin computing power.
CoinShares’ Q1 2026 Bitcoin Mining Report said Bitcoin’s hash price declined to around $29-$30 per petahash per second per day during early Q1, compared with approximately $36-$38 in the final quarter of 2025.
The report also projects a major change in miners’ revenue mix. AI infrastructure could generate as much as 70% of the revenue of publicly listed miners by the end of 2026, compared with roughly 30% at present.
Mining was already becoming more expensive. CoinShares estimated that publicly listed miners had a weighted-average cash production cost of about $79,995 per Bitcoin in Q4 2025.
The growing appeal of AI is largely about economics. Miners must decide how best to deploy limited supplies of electricity, data-center capacity and investment capital. CoinShares said AI infrastructure can provide higher and more consistent returns than Bitcoin mining while mining hash prices remain depressed.
As a result, miners that already control substantial power resources or operate suitable data centers have a strong incentive to dedicate more capacity to high-performance computing.
Miners are not abandoning Bitcoin
Despite the growing AI focus, CoinShares does not see evidence of a broad retreat from Bitcoin mining infrastructure in the U.S.
The country’s portion of the global Bitcoin hash rate increased by roughly two percentage points quarter over quarter, according to the report.
Instead, miners appear to be diversifying. Some listed companies are expanding AI and HPC operations alongside their mining businesses, leaving Bitcoin production as an important but increasingly challenging source of income.
The competition for electricity and data-center capacity is becoming more pronounced. CoinShares noted that AI infrastructure requires far greater capital investment, costing approximately $8 million-$15 million per megawatt, compared with around $700,000-$1 million per megawatt for Bitcoin mining infrastructure.
Listed miners have already announced more than $70 billion in combined AI and high-performance computing contracts.
Core Scientific, for example, has approximately 350 megawatts energized for HPC, with around 200 megawatts generating billed capacity. Its CoreWeave agreement has expanded to $10.2 billion over 12 years.
TeraWulf has 39 megawatts of critical IT capacity online at Lake Mariner and has secured $12.8 billion in contracted HPC revenue.
IREN has grown its fleet beyond 10,900 Nvidia GPUs, while Hut 8 agreed to a $7 billion, 15-year Fluidstack lease covering 245 megawatts at its River Bend campus.
AI-related operations are already contributing meaningful revenue at several companies. CoinShares said AI/HPC colocation accounted for 39% of Core Scientific’s Q4 revenue and 27% of TeraWulf’s.
IREN generated 9% of its revenue from AI Cloud, while HIVE’s HPC operations contributed 5%.
The strategy differs from one miner to another. CoinShares described IREN and Bitfarms as companies moving toward HPC while retaining Bitcoin mining as a transitional business.
CleanSpark is maintaining a stronger near-term focus on mining while developing its AI exposure. Marathon has deployed smaller containerized sites of about 10 megawatts, allowing it to make use of intermittent power resources.
That highlights one advantage Bitcoin mining retains over AI workloads: mining equipment can be switched off when electricity becomes unavailable or uneconomical, while AI infrastructure generally requires much more consistent uptime.
Mining profitability remains squeezed
CoinShares described Q4 2025 as the hardest quarter for Bitcoin miners since the April 2024 halving.
The combination of a significant Bitcoin price decline, a near-record network hash rate and three successive negative difficulty adjustments placed heavy pressure on hash prices. It was the first time since July 2022 that Bitcoin experienced three consecutive negative difficulty adjustments.
The weakness carried into Q1 2026, with hash price briefly reaching approximately $28 per PH/s per day in late February before recovering toward $30-$35.
CoinShares expects more expensive mining operations could shut down during the first half of 2026 unless Bitcoin stages a recovery.
Mid-generation mining machines need electricity below 5 cents per kilowatt-hour to remain profitable, while newer fleets operating below 15 J/TH generally have stronger economics at typical industrial electricity rates.
AI expansion complicates mining costs
The shift toward AI is also making traditional mining metrics harder to interpret.
For companies operating both mining and AI infrastructure, expenses such as debt, depreciation and overhead associated with HPC facilities can influence reported Bitcoin production costs even as mining output declines.
That can make it difficult to distinguish the economics of Bitcoin production from those of data-center operations.
Core Scientific’s failed merger with CoreWeave illustrates some of these difficulties. Shareholders rejected the transaction on Oct. 30, 2025. CoinShares also noted that Core Scientific later restated its financial statements after assets intended for demolition during the company’s HPC conversion had been improperly capitalized.
Bitcoin price could shift the balance
CoinShares said hash prices would need to remain above $40 per PH/s per day for a sustained period, a scenario that would likely require Bitcoin to approach $100,000 by the end of 2026 while the cryptocurrency’s price growth outpaces increases in network hash rate.
If Bitcoin remains under $80,000 for the rest of 2026, hash prices could continue declining if mining difficulty keeps rising. However, additional shutdowns among high-cost miners could reduce the network’s hash rate and help stabilize mining economics.
CoinShares emphasized that the AI pivot is not necessarily permanent. Bitcoin mining profitability remains closely tied to BTC’s market price, meaning a strong recovery could cause some operators to reconsider how they divide capital between mining and AI infrastructure.
For now, the shift appears to be driven primarily by relative returns rather than a definitive move away from Bitcoin mining.
Miners with access to inexpensive electricity, flexible power contracts and intermittent energy sources could continue to find traditional mining attractive, particularly at sites that cannot easily meet the near-continuous power requirements of AI workloads.
