The Great Mining Exodus

Core Scientific (Nasdaq: CORZ) announced today that it expects to sell all 2,500 of its bitcoin holdings in Q1 2026. The company had already offloaded 1,900 BTC in January alone, netting $175 million at an average price of around $92,000 per coin.

The proceeds aren't going into more mining rigs. They're funding the company's AI compute expansion — part of a broader pivot that has seen Core Scientific sign over $10 billion in AI hosting contracts while letting its bitcoin mining operations wind down.

Core Scientific isn't an outlier. It's a bellwether.

The pivot is everywhere

Across the United States, at least nine publicly traded bitcoin mining companies have announced plans to pivot either partly or wholly to AI and high-performance computing (HPC). The list reads like a who's who of industrial-scale miners: Riot Platforms, Bitfarms, TeraWulf, IREN, CleanSpark, Hut 8, Bit Digital, Marathon, and Cipher Mining.

The numbers are staggering. According to CoinShares research, these companies have announced more than $43 billion worth of AI and HPC contracts in recent months. Hut 8 alone signed a $7 billion, 15-year lease backed by Google. TeraWulf secured $6.7 billion with similar hyperscaler support. Riot Platforms, which was building what it called the "world's largest bitcoin mine" in Corsicana, Texas, is now repurposing two-thirds of that facility for AI workloads.

The transformation is so thorough that Bitfarms CEO Ben Gagnon put it bluntly: "Bitcoin mining is still profitable. It's that HPC creates so much more value per unit of energy and does so predictably for years into the future that the company can't justify further investment into bitcoin mining."

Why now?

The April 2024 halving cut block rewards in half — a scheduled event that happens roughly every four years. But this time, the pain was compounded by an exponential surge in network hashrate. More machines competing for fewer coins meant margins collapsed even as bitcoin traded near six figures.

CoinShares found that by late 2025, only a tiny minority of the largest public miners remained profitable at prevailing prices. Bitcoin's subsequent slide to around $85,000 — down 30% from its 2025 peak — turned a squeeze into a crisis.

Meanwhile, AI companies are desperate for data center capacity. Training frontier models requires massive amounts of power, specialized cooling, and reliable infrastructure — exactly what bitcoin miners spent years building. The machines are different (GPUs instead of ASICs), but the shells are compatible.

"Bitcoin mining created the blueprint for the AI compute boom and the modern data center," Meltem Demirors, general partner at Crucible Capital, said to Wired. "They have found that their cost of capital is much lower if they go into the AI narrative. They have the powered shell, they're ripping out the [mining machines], and their tenant is bringing the GPUs."

The hyperscaler backstop

What's made this transition bankable is a new financing mechanism: hyperscaler backstops. When a miner signs a lease with an AI infrastructure provider, tech giants like Google or Microsoft guarantee the payments. This transforms volatile mining companies into creditworthy landlords overnight, enabling project financing at loan-to-cost ratios as high as 85%.

It's a neat trick. The miners get stable, long-term revenue. The hyperscalers get powered infrastructure without waiting 5-7 years to build their own substations. Wall Street gets to underwrite the deals. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs have both jumped in.

What it means

The optimistic read: Bitcoin miners are finally finding product-market fit. Their real asset was always power infrastructure, not the ability to mint digital coins. AI just made that legible.

The pessimistic read: Bitcoin mining as an industry is hollowing out. If the economics only work when you're not actually mining, something has gone sideways. The network's security model depends on miners having skin in the game — not landlords collecting rent from Anthropic.

For now, the pivot continues. CoinShares estimates that mining revenue could fall from 85% of total sector revenue to under 20% by late 2026. The miners aren't abandoning bitcoin entirely — but they're clearly hedging their bets.

As CleanSpark put it: at current hashprices, bitcoin mining investment "doesn't make a lot of sense" compared to AI infrastructure returns.

That's not a ringing endorsement. It's an epitaph for an era.

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