The bitcoin mining industry is undergoing the most fundamental transformation in its history, and the clearest sign of this is not hash rate or difficulty adjustment metrics, writes coindesk.com.
CoinShares first quarter 2026 mining report released this week shows that the weighted average cost of production per bitcoin among publicly traded miners has risen to about $79,995 in Q4 2025.
Bitcoin has traded between $68,000 and $70,000, with last week’s CoinDesk Report estimating a loss of $19,000 per BTC mined.
These figures are not sustainable, and the industry recognizes this. The answer has been a radical turn towards artificial intelligence infrastructure that transforms what these companies actually are.
According to a CoinShares report, the public mining sector has already announced more than $70 billion in combined contracts in artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. CoreWeave’s expanded agreement with Core Scientific alone is valued at $10.2 billion over 12 years. TeraWulf has $12.8 billion in HPC revenue contracts, Hut 8 has signed a 15-year, $7 billion lease for AI infrastructure at its River Bend campus, and Cipher Digital has a multi-billion dollar agreement with Google-backed Fluidstack.
Colocation miners could derive up to 70% of their revenue from AI by the end of 2026, up from about 30% today. Core Scientific’s AI colocation revenue is already 39% of the total. TeraWulf is 27%. IREN is 9% and expanding rapidly with projects to build up to 200 megawatts of liquid-cooled GPU capacity.
This means that these mining companies are increasingly becoming data center operators while still mining bitcoin on the side.
Economics explains the reasons why. According to CoinShares, the cost gap between bitcoin mining infrastructure, which is roughly $700,000 to $1 million per megawatt, and AI infrastructure, valued at $8 million to $15 million per megawatt, is significant, but AI offers structurally higher and more stable returns.
