Bitcoin Miners Trade Rigs for AI as Power Becomes the Prize

It cost bitcoin miners an average of about $75,500 in cash to produce one coin in the second quarter. Meanwhile, bitcoin itself ended June at $58,400, less than half its October 2025 record high. That gap pushed publicly traded miners below cash breakeven as a group, according to CoinShares’ Q2 2026 Bitcoin Mining Report by Luke Nolan. Cash cost covers day-to-day spending such as power, staff and interest, but not equipment wear.Key Takeaways: Listed miners spent about $75,500 in cash per bitcoin last quarter, well above the coin’s June close. Grid delays and state restrictions have turned existing power connections into a scarce asset for AI data centers. WGMI broadened its strategy in August to include data centers, AI chipmakers and power producers alongside miners. See more: Why Bitcoin Miners Stopped Tracking Bitcoin’s Price Rather than wait out the slump, many miners are renting their power sites to AI and high-performance computing (HPC) customers. The report estimates AI computing earns about $1.5 million in yearly profit per megawatt of power, versus $0.5 million for mining. The shift is changing what investors own when they buy mining stocks. Companies with signed AI or HPC contracts traded at an average 12.9 times expected sales for the next year, the report found. Miners without such contracts, by contrast, averaged 3.7 times. In other words, the market values those miners at less than a third as much per dollar of sales. Power is now the scarce resource. At least 151 restrictions on data center development remain in force across the U.S., the report showed. New York, for example, enacted the first statewide pause on permits for large data centers in July. Power projects totaling about 2,600 gigawatts are also waiting to connect to the U.S. grid, the report said. That backlog is roughly double the grid’s installed capacity. As a result, prices have climbed for sites that already have power. A $3.5 billion deal for three leased Northern Virginia AI facilities worked out to about $27 million per megawatt, the report noted. By comparison, the market values some listed miners’ powered but unleased sites at less than $3 million per megawatt.Bitcoin Miners Pay to Stop MiningSome companies are paying to exit. Core Scientific, Inc. (CORZ) paid $41.9 million to cancel an order for next-generation mining chips, according to the report. Those chips are the most efficient mining hardware produced to date. Mining brings in about 13% of the company’s revenue as it converts sites for AI use, the report said. Its remaining machines run at a loss, only to use up power it has already agreed to buy. Keel Infrastructure Corp. (KEEL), formerly Bitfarms, stopped mining on June 29, according to the report. That makes it the first listed miner headed for zero mining revenue, starting in the third quarter. At IREN Ltd. (IREN), AI cloud revenue of $70.5 million topped mining revenue of $66.7 million for the first time, per the report. Most of the sector’s contracted AI revenue has not arrived yet, though. More than $100 billion in disclosed contracts supports only about $1.1 billion in yearly AI and HPC revenue, according to the report. Several of these miners anchor the CoinShares Bitcoin Mining and Digital Power ETF (WGMI A-). Eight of the report’s 12 companies ranked among its top 10 holdings as of September 29, CoinShares data show. On August 18, the fund broadened its strategy to include data center operators, AI chipmakers, power producers and HPC firms. The actively managed ETF does not, however, hold bitcoin directly, CoinShares said. WGMI held $291.5 million in assets as of September 28 and charges a 0.75% expense ratio, according to CoinShares. Cipher Digital Inc. (CIFR), the fund’s largest holding, will likely exit mining by the end of 2027, the report said. In the first half, it sold $123.4 million of bitcoin at a $47.7 million loss to help fund buildings for data center tenants. For more news, information, and strategy, visit the CoinShares Crypto ETF Hub.