Bitcoin hashrate drops 20.6% as miners chase AI contracts

Bitcoin's seven-day hashrate has spent 316 days below its record, down 20.6% from the October 2025 peak, as miners redirect capacity to AI.

Twenty One Capital CEO Rapha Zagury called it the first "bear market in hash rate" in Bitcoin history, telling the Bitcoin Asia 2026 conference in Hong Kong that "there really isn't anybody staying the course to mine bitcoin at scale" among public miners.

The seven-day network average stood near 914 exahashes per second on Aug. 31, about 20.6% below the October 2025 peak of 1,151.6 EH/s, according to Blockchain.com data. The stretch without a new high exceeds the previous 252-day maximum in the same series. BTC rallied 34.9% from late June through late August, reaching above $81,000, while network hashrate fell 10.1% over the same period — only the second such divergence since 2012.

The divergence matters because Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment normally restores mining economics after price rallies. VanEck estimated difficulty stood 18.3% below its November 2025 peak, the largest drawdown since China's 2021 mining ban, while hashprice improved to $39.36 per petahash per second per day by Aug. 31. Yet the infrastructure leaving Bitcoin now has a competing buyer: AI and high-performance computing operators signing long-duration contracts that make capacity harder to reclaim.

AI contracts outbid Bitcoin for miner capacity

The shift Zagury described is visible in deal flow. Riot Platforms signed a roughly $9 billion, 20-year compute agreement with Anthropic in August. Hut 8 secured a $9.8 billion, 15-year AI infrastructure lease covering 352 megawatts at its Beacon Point campus in Texas. Bitdeer signed a 16-year AI infrastructure agreement worth about $4.7 billion for 121 megawatts at its Tydal campus in Norway, with the contract potentially reaching $8 billion if an extension is exercised. Keel Infrastructure shut down all of its U.S. bitcoin mining operations as it prepares several sites for AI and HPC workloads.

The scale of these deals changes what happens after a miner switches off. A machine taken offline because hashprice fell can be restarted when Bitcoin becomes more profitable. But power committed to a long-duration AI customer cannot return nearly as quickly, even if Bitcoin rallies and difficulty falls.

IREN cut installed self-mining capacity from 50 EH/s in June 2025 to 23.2 EH/s by June 2026 as it decommissioned miners and redirected power toward AI Cloud Services. TeraWulf reported 102 MW of critical-IT capacity energized in July alongside 145 MW of legacy Bitcoin mining capacity.

Recovery signals compete with AI economics

Bitcoin's own recovery mechanism remains intact. The Aug. 8 difficulty adjustment rose 1 percent, the first upward move in the sequence VanEck tracked, and hashrate recovered toward 925 EH/s. By Aug. 31, Hashrate Index put seven-day hashrate at 915 EH/s, up 3.3 percent from 886 EH/s a week earlier. Blocks were arriving every 9 minutes and 56 seconds, almost exactly on Bitcoin's 10-minute target.

The Puell Multiple, which compares the dollar value of daily Bitcoin issuance with its one-year average, averaged about 0.73 over the preceding 30 days, placing it in the 16th percentile and pointing to unusually weak miner revenue conditions.

Some miners are still expanding aggressively. MARA reported 70.3 EH/s of energized hashrate as of June 30, while Bitdeer reached 76.7 EH/s of self-mining capacity in July. Riot increased deployed mining capacity to 44.4 EH/s from 38.5 EH/s even as it expanded into AI.

Zagury argued that operators that remain true to Bitcoin mining naturally gain a larger share of the network as competing hashrate disappears. The result is an unusual tension: AI may be pulling infrastructure away from Bitcoin while simultaneously improving the economics for miners willing to stay.

The question now is whether improving Bitcoin prices, hashprice and difficulty economics can pull enough idle machines back to end the 316-day drought. If they cannot, the reason may increasingly lie outside Bitcoin itself: some of the infrastructure that once waited for the next mining recovery is now being paid to stay somewhere else.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.