Bitcoin Miners Reduce Hash Rate by 21% Amid Shift to AI Infrastructure

Bitcoin miners have reduced their combined hash rate by 21.2% over the past nine months, according to MinerWeekly. This decline is attributed to a shift in focus from Bitcoin mining to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure.

The combined realized hash rate of public Bitcoin miners, excluding Bitdeer, decreased from 368.3 EH/s in the fourth quarter of 2025 to 319.0 EH/s in the second quarter of 2026. This drop is a significant concern for the Bitcoin network's overall health.

Bitdeer, on the other hand, has seen its realized hash rate increase by 44% to 63 EH/s, compensating for some of the decline. However, experts point out that weak mining economics and competition for capital and electricity from AI workloads are major contributing factors to this downturn.