Bitcoin Difficulty Falls Below Year-Ago Level Amid AI Infrastructure Shift

The Bitcoin network has reached a milestone it hasn't seen since the China mining ban in mid-2021. The difficulty level, which measures how hard it is to mine new Bitcoins, has fallen below where it was a year ago. According to Luxor's Hashrate Index, as of July 28, 2026, the difficulty stands at 126.23 trillion, a 19.1% decline from its November 2025 all-time high of 155.97 trillion.

This marks only the second time in Bitcoin's history that the network's difficulty has gone negative, with the first instance being the China ban. In this case, however, it wasn't a government-imposed restriction but rather economic factors driving miners offline. The same power infrastructure used to run Bitcoin miners is now more lucrative for artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, which pay between three and 25 times more per megawatt than mining currently offers.

The AI market's pull has led to a significant decline in the network's hashrate, with the seven-day average standing near 868 exahashes per second as of late July, down from over one zettahash per second at its late-2025 peak. The downward trend has now extended approximately 287 consecutive days.

The economic arithmetic is unforgiving for miners. The April 2024 halving cut the block reward in half, and with Bitcoin's price decline of roughly 47% from its October 2025 all-time high, a single block now yields around $197,000, down from approximately $393,750 at the peak.