08-26-2026 
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The BTC token’s recent price surge has given the network’s block reward miners something to celebrate, even as their artificial intelligence (AI) pivots are suddenly looking less like a sure thing.
- BTC surge comes just as U.S. states start reining in AI pivots
- BitFuFu hopes to profit off ‘less crowded’ mining sector
- Hive Digital says all its growth is now AI, not mining
- Bit Digital done with BTC, but mining still earning more than ETH staking
- Tether’s Uruguay mining debacle revealed
- Enegix to pivot ‘significant’ chunk of Kazakhstan mining ops to AI/HPC
The BTC token’s price surged close to US$80,000 over the past week, but it hasn’t done much to improve mining economics, as the average all-in cost of mining a single BTC—including the periodic replacements of older, slower ASIC rigs with newer, faster models—rose in tandem, topping $104,000 as of Tuesday evening.
Last week, the BTC network’s mining difficulty rate fell 1.3% to 125.8 trillion hashes—the average number of guesses required to ‘find’ a block and claim the 3.125 BTC block reward—and is currently projected to fall another 1% at its next adjustment on September 6.
Whether in whole or in part, nearly all miners have embraced the ‘pivot’ to providing data center infrastructure for AI and other high-performance computing (HPC) clients. But there are worrying signs that the AI lifeboat could prove less seaworthy than originally envisioned, as voter sentiment toward data centers takes a decidedly negative turn.
How bad is voter sentiment? The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) recently issued a memo to the AI sector warning them that the Senate seat currently held by Jon Husted (R-OH) could fall to Sherrod Brown, the Democrat who was ousted by $40 million in crypto campaign spending in 2024 and who has made Husted’s data center support the focus of his current campaign.
The memo begs AI operators to “fix how Ohioans see them,” and warns that “data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck. If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice—and they will not go near the next one.”
Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott, who until recently was America’s leading AI/mining champion, imposed a ‘temporary’ moratorium on new data center construction this month. Abbott subsequently attempted to justify his own ‘pivot’ on this issue by claiming data center builders “basically dug their own grave” by failing to collaborate with state and local governments.
In Pennsylvania, another leading data center hub, Gov. Josh Shapiro issued an executive order last week directing the state’s Department of Environmental Protection to limit its review of data center permit applications to developers who’ve “made a legally binding commitment to meet the Governor’s Responsible Infrastructure Development (GRID) Requirements” and have received approval from municipal governments.
Like Ohio’s Husted, both Abbott and Shapiro are up for re-election in November, as are some other governors in previously AI-friendly states. Their opponents are eagerly painting AI’s scarlet letter on these incumbents, looking to capitalize on growing voter antipathy toward AI overreach.
Many miners/AI-pivoters were quick to voice their support for governors taking these actions in states where these companies already operate. Miners may actually see temporary benefits from this pseudo-crackdown—which will almost certainly be lifted the moment incumbents are re-elected—as they already have facilities and grid access that could now be worth even more than they were in the previous age of limitless buildouts.
Either way, the share prices of publicly traded mining/data center operators are enjoying this moment, in which BTC is on the rise and ‘compute’ is worth even more than digital gold.
BitFuFu not fretting over other miners’ capitulation
One of the few remaining ‘mining-only’ miners is BitFuFu (NASDAQ: FUFU), which is also one of the few remaining miners that still issues monthly BTC production reports. BitFuFu’s July production totaled 112 BTC, down from 125 in June, as self-mining rose by two tokens to 72, but cloud mining output fell from June’s 55 to just 40 last month.
The company’s total hashrate at the end of July was 14.2 EH/s, down one point from June. But BitFuFu CEO Leo Lu said the company drew down its BTC treasury by some 357 tokens to help “secure additional future hashrate capacity.” Lu said the additional capacity has since boosted BitFuFu’s hashrate to 20 EH/s.
In more urgent need of a boost is BitFuFu’s bottom line. The company’s Q2 report showed a net loss of $20.5 million, a sharp reversal from Q2025’s $47.1 million profit, but an improvement over Q1’s $35 million loss. The company blamed/credited the bulk of the losses to declines in the value of its BTC treasury.
But that Q2025 profit was more than Q2026’s total revenue of just $42.8 million, which fell by nearly two-thirds from the same period last year (and 41% below Q1’s $72.7 million). The bulk of this decline came via a sharp fall in cloud mining revenue from $94.3 million to $24.9 million, while self-mining revenue was down only $800,000 to $14 million.
On the earnings call, Lu said the cloud mining decline came as the company recognized that “the economics of certain third-party hashrate contracts no longer met our requirements.” Lu said BitFuFu “will never sacrifice unit economics simply to maintain headline hashrate.”
Lu claimed the sector’s ongoing pivot to AI/HPC is “creating a more favorable long-term environment for high-quality miners that remain focused on Bitcoin mining … a less crowded network could support better operating conditions and further improvement in profitability and cash flow stability.”
That said, Lu said the company remains “open to high-quality opportunities that fit within our risk framework” and “will continue to closely monitor global power markets and evaluate opportunities in high-quality infrastructure and hash rate capacity, focusing on areas where our operating capabilities can give us an advantage.”
BTC’s recent surge has been equally kind to BitFuFu’s share price, which had risen over 15% in the past five days but closed Tuesday down 6.3% to $1.49. For the year-to-date, the company’s stock is down nearly 44% and down 61% over the past 12 months.
Hive Digital: ‘100% of our growth is in HPC and AI’
Hive Digital (TSXV: HIVE) saw its losses spike to $143.8 million in its fiscal Q1, only $4.6 million below the company’s net losses in all of its fiscal 2026. The bulk of this loss came from an $84.6 million non-cash provision for ‘regulatory liabilities,’ aka a fight with Swedish tax authorities over “contested VAT assessments” involving Hive’s Swedish subsidiaries.
The tax fight is primarily based on “the deductibility of input VAT associated with equipment and other expenditures … including ASIC mining equipment” extending back to 2023. Hive CFO Darcy Daubaras said that while the loss has been duly booked on paper, “we continue to dispute the underlying assessments and intend to pursue the legal remedies available to us.”
Hive chairman Frank Holmes went a little further, saying Sweden was “very anti-crypto industry.” Hive CEO Aydin Killic spelled it out plainly: “We have not paid it, we do not plan to pay it, and it is just something that we are going to continue to appeal.”
In terms of its Q1 performance, revenue was up 73.5% year-on-year and 10.2% sequentially to $79.1 million, of which mining accounted for $72 million. Hive’s data center offshoot BUZZ HPC contributed $7.1 million, up by more than one-half sequentially, thanks to the deployment of new Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) GPUs at its Manitoba facility.
On August 16, Hive announced that BUZZ HPC had signed a $350 million, five-year GPU cloud services agreement with an unspecified “investment-grade enterprise customer.” The deal involves the use of over 2,000 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs at the Bell AI Fabric facility in British Columbia, a site powered by 100% renewable hydroelectric energy.
On the earnings call, which was conducted just prior to BTC’s recent price surge, Kilic noted that the Q1 revenue split was “10% AI and 90% Bitcoin mining. Within the next few months, that is going to be 40% on the AI and 60% on Bitcoin mining.” While Kilic expressed hope that BTC’s price would “come around,” he acknowledged that “100% of our growth is in HPC and AI.”Hive’s share price closed Tuesday up 5.6% to $3.02. The shares are up 17.5% for the year-to-date and 14.4% higher than the same period last year.
Bit Digital still making more off mining than ETH staking
Hive’s revenue tilt away from mining is nothing compared to that of Bit Digital (NASDAQ: BTBT), which announced last year that it was getting out of mining altogether in favor of serving as a digital asset treasury (DAT) and staking firm focused on ETH, the native token of the Ethereum network.
At the time, Bit Digital CEO Sam Tabar was unequivocal in why his company was pivoting away from mining, calling it “a very shitty business” and predicted last October that the entire BTC mining sector would be “dead in two years.”
But Bit Digital still has a few ASICs chugging away, as its Q2 report showed revenue of $2.4 million from ‘digital asset mining.’ And while mining generated 58% less revenue over the first half of 2026 than the same period last year, mining’s Q2 contribution was nearly 3x the $900,000 that Bit Digital’s ETH staking revenue anted up.
Worse, the 44% decline in the ETH’s token fiat price over the past 12 months accounted for ~$75 million worth of Bit Digital’s Q2 net loss of $107.2 million. Similar to the BTC price surge, ETH’s value has risen 28% over the past week, so assuming this current pump isn’t a bull trap, Bit Digital’s Q3 might feature a little less red ink.
Speaking on the analyst call, Tabar said he was “not going to pretend that [ETH’s price plunge] was comfortable,” but he bristled at suggestions that Bit Digital was a DAT, saying “it is not what we are trying to be. The goal has never been to hold the most ETH. It is to get the most out of ETH that we hold.”
Bit Digital has done its own pivot to AI/HPC infrastructure, with its cloud services ($23.8 million) and colocation services ($4.7 million) segments providing the bulk of the company’s Q2 revenue, with the cloud services unit up 42% sequentially.
Tabar said his company was “neither purely AI infrastructure nor a digital asset treasury. Neither, and yet both. What we are building towards is the convergence of the two. Assets positioned for where the economy is going rather than where it is today.”
Tether’s ‘first step’ toward mining dominance was a doozy
Tether, issuer of the world’s leading stablecoin USDT, has made a few investments in the mining sector over the years, leading CEO Paolo Ardoino to declare last summer that Tether could become “the biggest Bitcoin miner in the world, even including all the public companies,” by the end of 2025.
That didn’t happen, despite Tether taking stakes in other miners and mining suppliers, launching an open-source Mining Operating System, plus the whole tangled web that is/was Northern Data.
Tether also launched a Uruguay-based mining offshoot called Microfin that folded in rather ignominious fashion last year after the state utility UTE cut off power due to a nearly $5 million unpaid electricity bill. Tether has said nothing about Microfin’s abrupt demise, but Reuters recently offered some fresh insights into what led to its collapse and the staggering cost of its brief existence.
A former Tether contractor claimed Uruguay was supposed to be the “first step” in the company’s South American mining strategy, with two mining sites built near the small city of Florida, north of the capital Montevideo. Starting in 2023, Tether reportedly invested $60 million in each of these sites, and early returns on this $120 million investment were said to be promising.
But Tether and UTE somehow arrived at very different interpretations of Microfin’s contracted power allocation. Tether believed the figures in Microfin’s contract represented a minimum level of power that could be increased as the need arose, while UTE saw the number as a maximum that couldn’t be exceeded.
The contractor claimed this disagreement often left Microfin’s sites sitting idle due to insufficient juice. The situation got worse following Uruguay’s late-2024 general election, which brought a new center-left government to power and new directors at UTE. By March 2025, when the new administration officially took over, Tether’s attempts to renegotiate its power deal were going nowhere.
Microfin ultimately stopped paying its utility bill, and Tether informed UTE in June that it would terminate its contracts. Efforts were made by both sides to negotiate a new agreement, but when UTE’s board issued a fresh memorandum of understanding and draft contract, Tether reportedly never sent anyone to sign the documents. UTE cut off Microfin’s power in July.
Last November, Tether informed Uruguay’s labor department that it would be permanently shutting Microfin’s operations and laying off local staff. The following month, Tether reportedly paid its overdue UTE tab and put the whole rotten experience in its rearview mirror.
Et tu, Enegix?
Tether’s Uruguayan escapade underscores the new reality that, following the April 2024 ‘halving’ of the BTC block reward, mining’s brutal economics have made access to cheap and abundant power a prerequisite not just for profits, but for survival.
Kazakhstan recently announced a new program to attract miners with promises of cheap power in exchange for operators contributing some of the BTC they produce to a state-run BTC ‘reserve.’ Among the miners that had already made Kazakhstan home was Enegix Global, the company behind the BTCpool.kz mining pool that launched in 2023, and which recently launched a similar state-sponsored mining pool in Oman.
But on Tuesday, BBC News quoted Enegix CEO Yerbolsyn Sarsenov saying the company was “moving confidently towards artificial intelligence and planning the gradual alignment of our energy and infrastructure capabilities, both in Kazakhstan and elsewhere, towards the development of AI infrastructure.”
Enegix is reportedly preparing to convert a “significant” portion of its mining operations to AI/HPC and claims to be in ‘active discussions’ with potential data center clients.
It’s yet more evidence that the challenging economics and uncertain returns from BTC mining just can’t compete with the lucrative and predictable revenue that comes from AI/HPC. If the current BTC surge proves unable to sustain itself for a sustained period, it remains to be seen what might convince any firm to continue bleeding red ink just for the privilege of securing the network.
Watch: Bitcoin Mining Meets AI at Mining Disrupt 2025
