Public Bitcoin Miners Abandon Ship for AI

Public Bitcoin miners are making a significant shift towards artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure due to its higher profitability. According to CoinShares, companies that have pivoted to AI will not return to mining even if the Bitcoin price recovers.

The capacity planned to exit from public miners reaches at least 35 ExaHashes per second (EH/s), which corresponds to 4.7% of the Bitcoin network's total processing power of approximately 750 EH/s.

Average cash cost of producing one Bitcoin in the second quarter reached around $75,500, while Bitcoin ended the quarter at $58,400. The revenue miners earned from a single unit of computing power also dropped to an all-time low of $27.70 per Hash per second (PH/s) per day.

CoinShares estimates that AI infrastructure is roughly three times more profitable than Bitcoin mining, with a profitability of approximately $1.5 million per megawatt compared to around $500,000 for Bitcoin mining.