Introduction to the Crisis
Bitcoin miners are facing considered one of the hardest economic challenges within the industry’s history. The combination of low Bitcoin prices and high network difficulty has led to a big decline in mining revenue, making it unattainable for a lot of operators to sustain their businesses. As a result, a growing variety of miners are abandoning their rigs and converting their facilities into AI compute hubs.
The Collapse of Hashprice
Hashprice, the dollar value miners earn per unit of computing power, has collapsed to its weakest level in years. This collapse has led to a historic profitability crunch, with many miners struggling to remain afloat. The hashprice has fallen below $35 per petahash, the bottom reading ever recorded. This reflects how much revenue a miner earns per petahash after accounting for Bitcoin’s price, block rewards, transaction fees, and mining difficulty.
Key Statistics
- All-time low: $34.49 PH/s (Nov. 21, 2025)
- Seven-day average: ~$37.48 PH/s (the weakest in greater than five years)
- Year-to-date decline: Over 50%
The Shift to AI
The reason for this shift is easy: the return profile of AI is dramatically higher. AI workloads generate 2–5 times more revenue per kilowatt-hour. Tech giants like Microsoft, OpenAI, and mega-cloud providers are desperate for GPU capability. Mining facilities have already got the 2 things AI infrastructure needs most: low cost power and industrial cooling.
Major Players’ Moves
Several major players have already begun redirecting their operations toward AI. Bitfarms, for instance, has announced plans to overhaul its business by 2027, converting roughly 341 megawatts of its Bitcoin mining capability into infrastructure for high-performance AI computing. CleanSpark has taken an identical path, securing AI compute contracts in Wyoming, in some cases beating traditional cloud providers which might be racing to fulfill demand.
Implications for Bitcoin
If large miners proceed routing their power toward AI fairly than Bitcoin, the network could face reduced hashrate growth, slower difficulty adjustments, greater centralization pressure, and better vulnerability to hostile mining cartels or state-aligned actors. For now, smaller miners profit — fewer competitors mean a rather larger slice of the block reward. However, analysts warn that a protracted exodus could reshape Bitcoin’s mining landscape in ways not seen because the 2021 ban in China.
Conclusion
The Bitcoin mining industry is undergoing a big shift as miners abandon their rigs and convert their facilities into AI compute hubs. The collapse of hashprice and the decline in mining revenue have led to a historic profitability crunch, making it unattainable for a lot of operators to sustain their businesses. As the industry continues to evolve, it stays to be seen how this shift will impact the longer term of Bitcoin and the mining landscape. One thing is definite, nonetheless: the economics of AI are proving way more attractive than Bitcoin mining at current prices, and lots of see the move as a technique to escape the deep boom-and-bust cycles which have defined the mining industry for a decade.
