Public bitcoin miners sold a record 32,000 BTC in Q1 2026, exceeding total net sales across all four quarters of 2025 and surpassing the roughly 20,000 BTC liquidated during the 2022 Terra-Luna collapse. The proceeds are funding a sector-wide migration into artificial intelligence and high-perfor...
"We're not a bitcoin mining company anymore. We're a power-infrastructure company that happens to mine bitcoin." — Asher Genoot, CEO, Hut 8 Corp.
Public bitcoin miners sold a record 32,000 BTC in Q1 2026, exceeding total net sales across all four quarters of 2025 and surpassing the roughly 20,000 BTC liquidated during the 2022 Terra-Luna collapse. The proceeds are funding a sector-wide migration into artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. According to CoinShares' Q1 2026 mining report, listed miners could derive up to 70% of their revenue from AI by December 2026, up from approximately 30% at the start of the year.
The economics are straightforward. JPMorgan estimates the average industry production cost at $77,000 per BTC, down from $90,000 at the start of the year as hashrate declined. The most efficient operators produce at $34,000-$43,000 per coin, but the majority of the fleet is operating at or below breakeven. AI workloads, by contrast, generate 3x to 25x more revenue per megawatt than bitcoin mining, according to multiple industry analyses. More than $70 billion in aggregate AI and HPC contracts have been signed by former mining operators since 2025.
What was once a bitcoin-native sector is now functionally a power-infrastructure industry with residual cryptocurrency exposure.
The April 2024 halving cut block rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. Eighteen months later, the consequences are acute.
Hash price — the daily revenue per unit of computing power — collapsed 66% from Bitcoin's October 2025 price peak, according to Hashrate Index data. As of April 23, 2026, hashprice stands at $36.46 per PH/s per day, up 13.65% from March lows but still structurally depressed relative to pre-halving levels.
Network hashrate peaked above 1.15 ZH/s in early 2026 before declining to approximately 940 EH/s by April 7. Mining difficulty hit an all-time high of 144.4 trillion in February before easing 2.43% to 135.59 trillion on April 17.
Production costs vary dramatically by operator:
| Metric | Value | |---|---| | Industry average cash breakeven (JPMorgan est.) | ~$77,000/BTC | | Efficient operators (sub-$0.05/kWh, latest ASICs) | $34,000–$43,000/BTC | | Older fleet shutdown threshold | ~$75,000/BTC | | Machines above 25 J/TH at typical EU rates | Unprofitable |
Approximately 20% of global mining capacity is currently operating at a loss, according to CoinShares. The result: operators with legacy fleets are either shutting down or reallocating power to higher-margin workloads.
Public miners sold approximately 32,000 BTC in Q1 2026, according to data compiled by Cointelegraph and BeInCrypto. This exceeds any quarterly total on record, including the roughly 20,000 BTC sold during the Terra-Luna market collapse in Q2 2022.
Major sellers include MARA Holdings, CleanSpark, Riot Platforms, Cango, Core Scientific, and Bitdeer.
MARA Holdings, the largest public miner by BTC held, sold 15,133 BTC between March 4 and March 25 for approximately $1.1 billion, according to SEC filings. Proceeds were used to repurchase convertible senior notes due 2030 and 2031 at a roughly 9% discount to par. As of December 31, 2025, MARA held 53,822 BTC valued at approximately $4.7 billion. The company also cut 15% of staff.
Core Scientific sold approximately 1,900 BTC in January for $175 million at an average price of $92,100 and confirmed plans to liquidate substantially all remaining holdings (approximately 2,537 BTC total) to fund its AI infrastructure buildout.
Aggregate miner holdings have declined from 1.86 million BTC in 2023 to approximately 1.8 million BTC, adding incremental sell pressure to the spot market.
One notable holdout: American Bitcoin (Hut 8's proprietary mining subsidiary) has accumulated over 7,000 BTC while maintaining production costs around $55,000 per coin.
The scale of the industry pivot is captured in a single number: over $70 billion in aggregate AI and HPC contracts signed by former bitcoin miners, according to CoinShares.
The deals are long-dated, hyperscaler-backed, and structured around power access rather than cryptocurrency economics:
| Company | Contract Partner | Value | Duration | Capacity | |---|---|---|---|---| | Core Scientific | CoreWeave | $10.2B | 12 years | 1.5 GW pipeline | | Hut 8 | Google-backed (Fluidstack) | $7.0B | 15 years | 245 MW (River Bend) | | TeraWulf | Not disclosed | $12.8B (contracted) | Various | Not disclosed | | Cipher Digital | AWS + Fluidstack/Google | Not disclosed | 15-year + 10-year | 600 MW total | | IREN | Microsoft | $1.94B (annualized) | 5 years | 200 MW liquid-cooled | | MARA | Starwood Capital Group JV | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | 1.0 GW initial, 2.5 GW target | | Riot Platforms | AMD | Not disclosed | 10-year lease | Texas facilities repurposed | | HIVE Digital | Various | $30M+ initial | Various | 300 MW (Paraguay) |
The revenue differential explains the speed of the transition. AI colocation and cloud services generate 3x to 25x more revenue per megawatt than bitcoin mining. At those multiples, the financial logic of maintaining mining operations diminishes rapidly — particularly for operators whose power costs exceed $0.05/kWh.
Core Scientific (CORZ): AI colocation revenue accounts for 39% of total revenue as of Q4 2025, with projections to reach 71% by year-end 2026 (up from 5% in 2024). CoreWeave's $10.2 billion deal anchors the pipeline. The company is developing 1.5 GW of leasable AI capacity. Q1 2026 earnings scheduled for May 6.
IREN: AI Cloud Services revenue reached $17.3 million in Q4 2025. Currently at 9% AI revenue share but scaling rapidly with 200 MW of liquid-cooled GPU capacity under construction. IREN's revenue from HPC is projected to reach 71% of total revenue by year-end, according to CoinShares. Stock rose 42% in January while Bitcoin declined 4%.
TeraWulf: At 27% AI revenue share with $12.8 billion in contracted HPC revenue. The company has pivoted from a pure-play mining operation to a diversified power-infrastructure provider.
MARA Holdings: Executed the largest single BTC treasury sale in industry history ($1.1 billion). Entered a 1 GW AI data center joint venture with Starwood Capital Group, with a long-term roadmap to scale to 2.5 GW. The company has rebranded internally as an energy and HPC operation.
Riot Platforms: Posted record $647.4 million annual revenue in 2025 but adjusted EBITDA collapsed to $12.96 million from $463.19 million. Signed a 10-year AMD data center lease operational since January 2026. Holds a 2 GW power portfolio as its primary strategic asset.
Hut 8: Signed the $7 billion, 15-year Google-backed AI data center lease at River Bend. Its subsidiary American Bitcoin takes a contrarian approach, accumulating BTC rather than selling.
HIVE Digital: Closed a $115 million private offering of 0% exchangeable senior notes on April 22, with net proceeds of approximately $109.5 million earmarked for GPU purchases and data center development. Shares jumped 8.1% on the announcement. Targets approximately $140 million in annual recurring GPU cloud revenue.
Mining stocks are beginning to trade on power-infrastructure fundamentals rather than Bitcoin price alone. According to JPMorgan, twelve of the 14 miners it tracks outperformed Bitcoin's 4% January decline. Mining stocks overall outpaced Bitcoin by nearly 40% during the 2026 rally period.
The correlation coefficient between BTC price and mining stock performance typically ranges from 0.75 to 0.85. That relationship is weakening as AI revenue share increases. Mining stocks were trading at roughly 150% of the four-year block reward opportunity at year-end 2025 — about three times the post-2022 average — reflecting the market's pricing of AI optionality rather than mining economics.
JPMorgan upgraded Cipher Digital and CleanSpark while trimming price targets for MARA and Riot, reflecting a preference for operators with advanced AI infrastructure buildouts over those still primarily reliant on mining revenue.
The sector's migration raises a structural question for Bitcoin's long-term security model. If the most capitalized mining operators are reallocating power capacity from SHA-256 hashing to GPU inference, the network's security is increasingly maintained by smaller, private operators and geographic niches with stranded energy.
Network hashrate has already declined from peak levels above 1.15 ZH/s to approximately 940 EH/s. This does not represent a security crisis — the network remains orders of magnitude more secure than any alternative — but the trend merits monitoring.
The foundational tension: Bitcoin's security budget depends on mining being economically attractive relative to alternatives. When AI workloads offer 3-25x the revenue per megawatt, rational capital allocation dictates the outcome. Bitcoin's fee revenue — approximately $115 million annualized, per industry estimates — cannot compete with multi-billion-dollar hyperscaler contracts for the same power infrastructure.
The Bitcoin mining industry is undergoing a structural transformation, not a cyclical downturn. The combination of post-halving economics, elevated energy costs, and the emergence of hyperscaler demand for power infrastructure has created a one-way door for most public operators. The $70 billion in signed AI contracts dwarfs the approximately $3.1 billion in annual blockchain base-layer fee revenue across all networks.
For the miners, this is rational economic behavior: the same megawatt that generates $35 per day mining bitcoin can generate $100-$875 per day running AI inference. The transition is accelerating because the math requires it.
For Bitcoin, the implications are longer-term but material. The network's security model assumes mining remains the highest-value use of hash-capable power infrastructure. That assumption is being tested. Whether Bitcoin's fee market can develop sufficiently to compete with AI compute revenue over the next decade will determine the sustainability of the network's security budget — a question the foundational economic-value framework identifies as central to blockchain viability.
The sector that once called itself "bitcoin mining" is now, functionally, a power-infrastructure industry that maintains residual cryptocurrency exposure. Market valuations reflect this reality. So do the quarterly BTC sales.