Bitcoin miners are facing unprecedented pressure. The combination of rising electricity costs, low transaction fees, and declining bitcoin prices is forcing them to seek alternative sources of revenue. A significant portion of them are therefore shifting their expensive energy and computing infrastructure toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC).
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Revenue declines and costs exceeding bitcoin’s market price
The situation in the mining sector is critical primarily due to extremely low transaction fee revenue, which accounts for less than 1% of miners’ total income – a level last recorded nearly a decade ago. Miners are thus fully dependent on the fixed block reward (3.125 BTC), but its real dollar value has weakened significantly with the decline in bitcoin’s price. According to data from the Checkonchain platform, the average estimated cost of mining one bitcoin is approximately $78,254, which is almost 23% more than its current spot price on the market.
Given these economic obstacles, the network’s total computing power (hashrate) has declined by approximately one-third from its peak in October 2025 – from 1.3 ZH/s to the current roughly 861 EH/s. This significant drop confirms that part of the mining industry is actually scaling down its operations. Although the automatic difficulty adjustment mechanism continually responds and protects bitcoin’s security itself, maintaining purely bitcoin mining is becoming economically unsustainable for many companies.
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Transition to artificial intelligence as a new survival strategy
The response to this crisis is a massive shift in capacity toward AI-focused data centers. Companies like CleanSpark or Keel Infrastructure are already adjusting their strategies or shutting down unprofitable mining operations and leasing their energy capacity for artificial intelligence needs, where demand for computing power is enormous. As Charles Edwards of Capriole Investments points out, this is not merely a short-term reaction to bitcoin’s price, but a fundamental and overlooked structural shift of the entire industry.
While this development does not immediately threaten bitcoin’s functioning, it fundamentally changes the role of the miners themselves. From single-purpose companies, they are becoming broader energy and technology companies for which cryptocurrency mining is just one of several possible activities. If AI offers higher and more stable returns in the long term, miners will primarily process bitcoin only during periods when it is most economically advantageous for them.
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