Bitcoin Hashrate Plummets as Miners Flee for AI Cloud Services

The Bitcoin network hashrate has now spent 316 consecutive days below its all-time high, marking the longest such stretch in nearly a decade.

This milestone is significant because hashrate typically follows price higher within weeks, as miners bring idle machines back online. However, this cycle has weakened, and public-company disclosures point to a structural cause rather than a temporary lull tied to weather or seasonality.

The smoothed metric peaked near 1,151 EH/s in late October 2025 but sat around 914 EH/s at the end of August 2026, a gap of roughly 20% that has persisted despite a rising Bitcoin price and back-to-back downward difficulty adjustments.

Listed miners' own filings provide evidence that this is not a normal cycle. IREN Limited, for example, confirmed installed Bitcoin mining capacity of approximately 23.2 EH/s as of June 30, 2026, down from around 50 EH/s a year earlier.