Bitcoin Miners Spend Record $30.7 Billion as Mining Difficulty Hits Two-Year Low

Bitcoin miners and AI data center peers spent $30.7 billion in capital expenditures in the first half of 2026, surpassing the $21.53 billion recorded for all of 2025 by a significant margin of 42.6%. This surge in spending was largely driven by twelve listed miners who accounted for $6.87 billion, already exceeding their combined $6.5 billion for all of 2025.

AI-native cloud companies CoreWeave and Nebius contributed nearly three-quarters of the total spending, with capital expenditures during the same period being nearly 15 times the revenue generated by these businesses.

As listed Bitcoin miners accelerate the reallocation of power and infrastructure toward AI and HPC, the realized hashrate of the miners it tracks fell 13.4% over six months, from 368.3 EH/s in Q4 2025 to 319 EH/s in Q2 2026.

Bitcoin mining difficulty fell 0.74% in its latest adjustment to 126.23 T, down about 14% from its January 2026 peak and about 19.1% from its all-time high, marking only the second year-over-year decline in Bitcoin mining difficulty on record.