Bitcoin Miners Abandon Cryptocurrency in Favor of AI Computing

Bitcoin miners are shifting away from cryptocurrency mining due to the rising costs of production. In the second quarter, it cost an average of $75,500 in cash to produce one Bitcoin, while its price ended June at $58,400, less than half its October peak.

This gap has pushed publicly traded miners below cash breakeven as a group, according to CoinShares' Q2 2026 Bitcoin Mining Report by Luke Nolan. Rather than wait out the slump, many miners are renting their power sites to AI and high-performance computing (HPC) customers, which earn about $1.5 million in yearly profit per megawatt of power.

Companies with signed AI or HPC contracts trade at an average 12.9 times expected sales for the next year, while miners without such contracts average 3.7 times, valuing those miners at less than a third as much per dollar of sales.