Public bitcoin miners sold 32,758 BTC — approximately $2.3 billion at blended prices near $70,000-$73,000 — in the first half of 2026 to fund construction of AI data centers. The liquidation, led by MARA Holdings (23,093 BTC) and Riot Platforms (9,665 BTC), marks the largest coordinated treasury ...
"We don't underwrite applications. We underwrite scarce power. Applications change, customer demand changes, technology changes. Our job is to preserve the flexibility to commercialize that power through the highest value use case over time." — Asher Genoot, CEO, Hut 8
Public bitcoin miners sold 32,758 BTC — approximately $2.3 billion at blended prices near $70,000-$73,000 — in the first half of 2026 to fund construction of AI data centers. The liquidation, led by MARA Holdings (23,093 BTC) and Riot Platforms (9,665 BTC), marks the largest coordinated treasury drawdown in mining-sector history and confirms an irreversible strategic pivot: companies that once defined themselves by hashrate now define themselves by megawatts under contract.
The numbers are stark. Public miners have signed more than $70 billion in cumulative AI and high-performance computing (HPC) lease contracts. Hashprice — daily mining revenue per petahash — closed Q1 2026 near $23.9/PH/s/day, a multi-year low according to Hashrate Index. Mining revenue as a share of total revenue is projected to fall from roughly 85% in early 2025 to under 20% by year-end 2026 for firms with signed AI contracts. What remains is an industry that has functionally reclassified itself: these are no longer bitcoin miners. They are power-infrastructure companies that happen to mine bitcoin.
Bitcoin mining economics have deteriorated to near-breakeven levels for much of the industry. Network difficulty sits near an all-time high at approximately 139 trillion. Hashprice hovered in the high-$20s per PH/s/day as of mid-2026, down from peaks above $100/PH/s/day in prior cycles. At current levels, only operators running recent-generation ASICs (Bitmain S21 series, S23, rated under 15 J/TH) at power costs below $0.08/kWh generate positive mining margins.
The electricity-only breakeven for Bitcoin production sits near $74,000, while full-cost models — including depreciation, SG&A, and financing — push the breakeven above $100,000 per coin. With Bitcoin trading near $80,000 in late August 2026, the margin cushion is thin. This compression explains the pivot: AI colocation contracts offer $200,000-$300,000 in annual revenue per megawatt, compared to roughly $50,000-$80,000 per megawatt from Bitcoin mining at current hashprices.
The aggregate contract value signed by former bitcoin miners now exceeds $70 billion, concentrated in multi-decade leases with hyperscalers and frontier AI labs. Three deals alone account for over $50 billion:
| Company | Counterparty | Capacity (MW) | Contract Value | Term | |---------|-------------|---------------|---------------|------| | TeraWulf | Anthropic | 401 | $19B | 20 years | | Hut 8 | Undisclosed (investment-grade) | 1,000 (Beacon Point) | $19.6B | 15 years | | Core Scientific | CoreWeave / AMD | ~1,100 | $24B+ | 12-15 years | | Riot Platforms | Anthropic | 191 | $9.1B | 20 years | | Hut 8 | Undisclosed | ~949 (total contracted) | $26.6B | Various |
The TeraWulf-Anthropic deal, announced July 6, 2026, involves a 20-year lease at the Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky — a former aluminum smelting facility. Initial capacity is expected online in H2 2027, with full 401 MW operational in 2028.
Core Scientific raised $3.3 billion via a junk bond sale in April 2026 to finance its AI data center construction. Colocation revenue reached $136.7 million in Q2 2026, with an anticipated 80-85% profit margin on the CoreWeave contract.
Hut 8 — CEO Asher Genoot has repositioned the company as a "power-first" infrastructure platform. The firm went from zero contracted AI revenue approximately one year ago to roughly $27 billion in contracted AI revenue and about $1.75 billion in annualized EBITDA, according to company disclosures. Its Beacon Point campus (1 GW) in Texas was fully commercialized as of July 20, 2026. Stock has surged approximately 200% in 2026, even as its mining subsidiary ABTC declined 76%.
Riot Platforms — CEO Jason Les called Q1 2026 "a definitive inflection point" as the company became "an active, revenue-generating data center operator." The $9.1 billion, 20-year Anthropic lease at its Rockdale, Texas facility covers 191 MW. Riot also signed a 10-year, 25 MW lease with AMD in January 2026, expandable to 200 MW. The company sold 9,665 BTC in H1 2026, cutting its treasury to 11,380 BTC.
MARA Holdings — Acquired Long Ridge Energy for $1.5 billion on April 30, 2026, adding a 505 MW Ohio gas plant and lifting total power capacity 65% to 2.2 GW. In partnership with Starwood Capital, MARA is converting U.S. sites into AI-ready data centers targeting over 1 GW of IT capacity. Q2 2026 revenue fell 27% to $174.9 million, with a $611 million net loss driven by $343 million in digital-asset fair-value declines.
TeraWulf — Q2 2026 HPC lease revenue from Anthropic and Fluidstack grew to $31.9 million. The headline net loss of $940.8 million was largely non-cash: $755.7 million from marking Google warrants to market. TeraWulf also sold a majority interest in its Abernathy joint venture to Fluidstack as part of its restructuring toward AI-focused operations.
Core Scientific — Total leased customer power capacity sits near 1.1 GW. The AMD contract alone covers approximately 530 MW across five sites, with options on up to 2.5 GW more and over $14 billion in base contracted revenue. Q2 2026 colocation revenue hit $136.7 million.
The industry's treasury strategy has fundamentally reversed. Where the 2021-2024 playbook centered on "HODL" — accumulating mined bitcoin on the balance sheet as a leveraged bet on price appreciation — 2026 has seen systematic liquidation.
MARA sold 23,093 BTC for approximately $1.6 billion in H1 2026. Riot sold 9,665 BTC. Together, the two largest public miners liquidated 32,758 BTC in six months, generating roughly $2.3 billion in proceeds at blended prices averaging $70,000-$73,000.
According to EdaFace, public miners sold over 32,000 BTC in H1 2026 as network difficulty dropped 15.1%. The dominant motivation, per CoinDesk reporting, was strategic: converting bitcoin treasuries into the USD capital required for AI data center infrastructure that will not generate revenue for 12 to 36 months.
Riot completed a $96 million land acquisition at Rockdale in January 2026, funded by selling 1,080 BTC. The transaction illustrates the direct pipeline from BTC treasury to physical infrastructure.
NYDIG's August 27, 2026 sale of its institutional trading business to BitGo — for $42.5 million ($7 million cash, $35.5 million in BitGo stock) — crystallizes the industry's directional bet. The move shed approximately 30 employees and exited execution, derivatives, structured products, and financing — all to concentrate on power generation, bitcoin mining, and high-performance computing.
NYDIG's development pipeline exceeds 3 GW of power generation capacity, with over 1 GW expected for delivery in 2027-2028. The company previously acquired Crusoe's Bitcoin mining operations in March 2025, adding roughly 270 MW. The trajectory is clear: NYDIG has decided that owning electrons is more valuable than intermediating trades.
BitGo, for its part, absorbed NYDIG's institutional trading capabilities to build a more complete prime services stack — execution, derivatives, financing, custody, and settlement under one roof. The deal's modest $42.5 million price tag suggests the trading business was valued primarily for its client relationships and operational capabilities rather than standalone profitability.
Q2 2026 earnings across the mining sector reveal a consistent pattern: mining revenue declining, AI/HPC revenue emerging, and large non-cash losses from digital asset markdowns masking operational progress.
| Company | Q2 Revenue | Net Loss | Key Non-Cash Hit | |---------|-----------|----------|-----------------| | MARA | $174.9M (-27% YoY) | -$611M | $343M digital asset decline | | Hut 8 | $74.9M | -$177.1M | $138.6M unrealized digital asset loss | | TeraWulf | N/A | -$940.8M | $755.7M Google warrant mark-to-market | | Core Scientific | $136.7M (colocation) | N/A | N/A |
Bitcoin mining "failed to turn a profit" across the sector in Q2 2026, according to KuCoin analysis, even as AI revenue grew. The gap between contracted future revenue (tens of billions) and current reported revenue (hundreds of millions) remains the central tension for investors.
The pivot reshapes where economic value accrues in the mining ecosystem. In the traditional model, value flowed: electricity provider → miner → Bitcoin network (hashrate) → miner (block rewards) → exchanges (liquidation). The new model routes value differently: electricity provider → power-infrastructure company → AI hyperscaler (lease payments) → shareholders.
The economic implications are significant. AI colocation margins (80-85% on CoreWeave-type contracts) dwarf mining margins (often sub-10% at current hashprices). A megawatt allocated to AI generates 3-5x the revenue of a megawatt allocated to Bitcoin mining. The rational economic actor — which these publicly traded, shareholder-accountable entities are — follows the higher-margin use case.
Bitcoin mining is not being abandoned. It is being reframed as a flexible, interruptible load that fills capacity during data center construction and ramp-up periods. MARA's collaboration with MPLX to use natural gas from processing plants for behind-the-meter electricity generation exemplifies this hybrid model: mine bitcoin when AI demand is low, redirect power to AI when demand is high.
The bitcoin mining industry's identity crisis is over. The answer, for public companies at least, is that they are energy-infrastructure businesses. The transition is being financed by liquidating the very asset — bitcoin — that once defined these firms. Whether this proves to be a well-timed pivot or a case of selling a scarce asset at cycle lows to fund speculative capex will depend on two variables: whether AI compute demand sustains the lease economics over 15-20 year terms, and whether bitcoin's price trajectory makes the 32,000+ BTC sold in H1 2026 look cheap in retrospect.
The data suggests the industry has done the math and concluded that a megawatt of power under a 20-year AI lease is worth more than a megawatt of hashrate. The market, for now, agrees: Hut 8's stock is up 200% in 2026 while hashprice sits at multi-year lows. The open question is whether $70 billion in contracted revenue — most of which does not materialize until 2027-2028 — will survive the execution risk of building out gigawatts of data center capacity on schedule and on budget.