Bitcoin's Hash Rate Plummets Amid Shift Towards Artificial Intelligence
The Bitcoin network has seen a prolonged decline in its hash rate, reaching a record low of 20.6% below its peak in October 2025. This has been attributed to weak mining economics, power curtailments, and a shift by some operators towards artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. According to Twenty One Capital CEO Raphael Zagury, this episode marks the first sustained 'economic hashrate bear market' for Bitcoin.
Despite a 34.9% price increase in BTC from late June to late August, reaching as high as $81,000, the network's hash rate fell by 10.1%. This divergence is unprecedented since 2012 and suggests that some of the power and data-center capacity leaving Bitcoin now has somewhere else to go.
The usual recovery signals are already appearing across mining economics. The Puell Multiple, which compares the dollar value of daily Bitcoin issuance with its one-year average, averaged about 0.73 over the preceding 30 days, placing it in the 16th percentile and pointing to unusually weak miner revenue conditions.