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- Listed Bitcoin miners fell below aggregate cash breakeven in Q2 as hashprice reached a record low.
- Several operators are actively retiring hashrate and redirecting power toward AI and high-performance computing.
- Grid connections are becoming strategic assets as U.S. data-center projects face years-long interconnection delays.
- Investors are already paying substantially higher valuation multiples for miners with contracted AI capacity.
Bitcoin miners spent years treating electricity as an input for producing BTC. CoinShares’ Q2 2026 mining report suggests that relationship is changing: for a growing group of listed miners, access to electricity is becoming the asset itself.
Bitcoin ended June at $58,400 against average ex-tax cash production costs of roughly $75,500 per BTC across the listed sector. Yet the industry’s response is increasingly about reallocating power rather than simply installing more efficient mining machines. AI developers need enormous quantities of electricity, and miners already control sites connected to grids where new data centers can wait years for access.
Miners Are Paying to Remove Hashrate
Bitcoin mining economics deteriorated sharply during the quarter. June hashprice reached a record low of $27.70 per PH/s/day, while transaction fees contributed less than 1% of block rewards.
The response from some operators goes beyond slowing expansion.
Core Scientific paid $41.9 million to cancel approximately 15 EH/s of next-generation mining equipment. Its remaining self-mining operation posted a negative 56% gross margin, with some machines continuing to operate partly because power obligations remained during the conversion of sites toward AI infrastructure.
Keel stopped mining entirely on June 29. Cipher does not plan additional mining capex and expects mining to become immaterial by 2030. CoinShares estimates at least 35 EH/s will leave the listed-miner cohort as announced transitions proceed.
IREN provides perhaps the clearest indication of where the economics are heading. Its quarterly AI cloud revenue reached $70.5 million, exceeding $66.7 million from mining, while 71% of TeraWulf’s Q2 revenue came from HPC leases.
These companies are no longer merely diversifying away from Bitcoin. They are deciding whether an available megawatt produces a better return connected to ASICs or AI servers.
One Megawatt, Two Very Different Businesses
CoinShares estimates that current AI economics can generate approximately $1.5 million of annualized profit per MW, compared with about $500,000 from Bitcoin mining.
That comparison changes how mining infrastructure can be valued. Instead of asking only how efficiently a company converts electricity into BTC, investors increasingly need to ask what alternative return that electricity could generate.
The headline advantage for AI therefore comes with a substantial qualification. Building or converting AI-grade infrastructure can require $8 million to $15 million per MW, compared with roughly $700,000 to $1 million for mining infrastructure. AI facilities require different cooling, networking, redundancy and reliability standards.
A mining campus cannot simply replace ASICs with GPUs and capture three times the profit.
Grid Access May Be More Valuable Than the Mining Equipment
The strongest part of the AI thesis is not computing hardware. It is electricity.
CoinShares identifies at least 225 data-center moratoriums or restrictions across 30 U.S. states, with 151 still active. The U.S. interconnection queue has reached approximately 2,600 GW, roughly twice the country’s installed generation capacity, while projects completed in 2025 faced a median wait exceeding five years between requesting grid access and entering operation.
Bitcoin miners already solved that problem years ago.
Many secured large parcels of land, substations, transmission capacity and power agreements when demand for data-center electricity was considerably lower. What was originally built to host ASICs can therefore offer AI developers something difficult to reproduce quickly: hundreds of megawatts that are already energized or substantially advanced through the interconnection process.
The valuation gap shows how much that can matter.
CoinShares points to a $3.5 billion transaction involving three fully leased Northern Virginia AI data centers that implied roughly $27 million per MW. Some listed miners’ energized but unleased capacity is valued below $3 million per MW.
The difference is not free upside. A fully developed facility with a creditworthy tenant deserves a much higher valuation than an energized mining site requiring billions of dollars of conversion capex.
But it suggests that the traditional mining balance sheet can understate the strategic value of secured power.
Wall Street Is Pricing Contracts Before Revenue Arrives
Investors have already started separating miners according to their AI exposure.
CoinShares calculates that companies with contracted AI/HPC capacity trade at an average 12.9x enterprise value to next-12-month sales, versus 3.7x for continuing miners without AI contracts. Hut 8, Cipher, TeraWulf and Core Scientific average an even higher 19.4x.
That premium creates a new risk: AI announcements can become more valuable to equity markets than AI operations are to the underlying business.
More than 4 GW of IT capacity has been contracted across the companies tracked by CoinShares, but only around 550 MW is currently billing. Disclosed AI/HPC backlog exceeds $100 billion, while annualized revenue remains around $1.1 billion.
The difference between those numbers is where execution risk sits.
Signed capacity still has to be financed, constructed, energized, fitted with appropriate cooling and networking infrastructure, delivered to customers and converted into recurring revenue.
Core Scientific demonstrates the capital required. Its colocation revenue rose sharply as capacity entered service, but Q2 capital expenditure simultaneously approached $798 million.
For investors, a headline backlog figure should therefore carry less weight than the speed at which contracted megawatts become billing megawatts.
A Bitcoin Rally Could Change the Calculation Again
AI currently offers superior economics per MW, but mining retains something that long-term hosting contracts can sacrifice: direct operating leverage to Bitcoin.
Hashprice recovered from its June low toward $38 as BTC rebounded toward $77,000, bringing most operators back above cash breakeven according to CoinShares.
A further Bitcoin rally could materially improve mining profitability without requiring years of construction or billions of dollars in conversion spending. Miners locked into long-duration AI contracts cannot simply reclaim that electricity when BTC economics improve.
That makes flexibility valuable.
A company that converts every available megawatt to AI may secure predictable contracted cash flows but surrender upside during another highly profitable mining cycle. A pure miner retains that upside but remains exposed to Bitcoin prices, network difficulty and increasingly thin transaction-fee revenue.
The strongest infrastructure portfolios may ultimately be those capable of allocating capital selectively rather than making an all-or-nothing bet on either industry.
The New Mining Dashboard Has Three More Numbers
Hashrate, joules per terahash, power costs and BTC production still matter. But they no longer tell investors enough about companies turning themselves into digital-infrastructure operators.
The additional metrics are energized MW, contracted MW and billing MW.
Energized capacity measures the scarce infrastructure already secured. Contracted capacity indicates potential demand. Billing capacity shows how much of that opportunity has actually become revenue.
The gap between contracted and billing megawatts may be the most revealing number during the next several quarters. It separates AI ambition from AI execution at a time when equity valuations already assume substantial success.
CoinShares expects AI/HPC revenue to accelerate through the second half of 2026 as additional capacity starts billing. Financing will matter just as much: miners are committing billions of dollars to infrastructure capable of supporting those contracts.
Bitcoin mining is therefore not simply being replaced by AI. The industry’s scarce resource is being repriced.
Electricity once mattered because it could produce Bitcoin cheaply. In an increasingly power-constrained data-center market, having that electricity available in the right location, with a viable route to AI-grade infrastructure and a customer willing to pay for it, may be considerably more valuable.
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