07-22-2026 
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Block reward miners are finally catching a break as the BTC token enjoys a minor price bump, but it won’t be enough to lure miners away from their artificial intelligence (AI) pivot.
- Challenging mining environment boosts network security concerns
- CleanSpark announces first AI data center deal
- Bitdeer sees record monthly BTC production as Nevada factory breaks ground
- Cango, Canaan dodge delisting, but for how long?
- IREN announced raising its annualized AI run-rate revenue
- Public souring on data centers as New York orders ‘temporary’ moratorium
- Is AI boom setting us up for a major global recession?
Long-suffering BTC miners caught a break this week as reports of a deal on the U.S. Senate’s digital asset market structure legislation (CLARITY Act) sent the token’s price above US$66,000 for the first time in over a month.
The BTC network’s mining difficulty rate also cooperated, falling from 133.9 trillion hashes (the average number of guesses needed to claim the current block reward of 3.125 tokens) to 127.2 trillion on July 12.
The next rate adjustment, scheduled for July 26, is expected to bring an even sharper decline to ~107 trillion, as individual blocks are now averaging nearly 12 minutes to find. Should the current expectation hold, that decline would be significantly greater than February’s 11.2% drop following winter storms that curtailed access to U.S. electricity grids.
But as of Tuesday evening, the all-in cost of mining a single BTC (including periodic replacement of older, slower ASIC mining rigs) stands at ~$70,500, meaning the token’s price has a way to go before most miners are breaking even.
While BTC’s rising price could coax a few miners to switch on a few more ASICs, it won’t stop miners ‘pivoting’ to powering data centers for AI operators. The volatility and uncertainty of mining simply can’t compete with the more predictable revenue streams from data center clients.
The ongoing miner exodus has prompted fresh concerns about the BTC network’s security, as fewer miners processing BTC transactions raise concentration concerns. The latest voice to raise this issue is Social Capital founder Chamath Palihapitiya, who warned of potential “structural” changes to the network given that “marginal energy to mine BTC is worth 10-20x if reallocated to serving AI tokens.”
Pushback on Palihapitiya’s arguments was swift, with Brian Armstrong, CEO of the Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) digital asset exchange, responding that BTC’s price wasn’t determined solely by mining hash power or energy allocation. However, Armstrong offered no assurances regarding the security of the network if the rate of concentration accelerates.
Patrick Shyu, a former engineer at Meta (NASDAQ: META) and Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) popularly known as TechLead, offered a more detailed critique of BTC’s security issues a few weeks ago in a video titled “Why I Sold All My Bitcoin… it’s over.“
Shyu notes that BTC failed to follow the security model set out by Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, who envisioned an ever-growing number of low-cost transactions generating fees that would supplant and eventually replace the block reward, which halves every four years (and is set to fall to just 1.5625 tokens in 2028).
But the artificial bandwidth constraints that changed Bitcoin from the ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash’ to the ‘digital gold’ of BTC mean total daily fees from network transactions rarely exceed 4 BTC, which isn’t much to split among those securing the network.
Shyu accurately notes that Satoshi “never imagined most coins just sitting there, not moving … as the fees fade, miners switch off, security drops, the network weakens again, more miners sell off, and a slow death spiral could trigger.”
CleanSpark finally lands an AI dance partner
While BTC may be dying, those miners embracing the ‘pivot’ continue to reap the rewards. On July 14, CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK) announced its first AI deal, a 20-year lease agreement at its Sandersville, Georgia, ‘campus’ with an unspecified “high-investment grade, leading global technology company with a market-leading commercial profile.” CleanSpark said it expects the lease to generate ~$6.6 billion in revenue over its initial term.
The mystery tenant is “facilitating CleanSpark’s financing options and the multi-decade term of the lease” via a triple-net deal. The client has also “executed a letter of intent and exclusivity arrangement covering CleanSpark’s entire Texas portfolio of 718 acres with up to 885 MW of secured and planned power capacity.” CleanSpark says this positions Sandersville as “the first chapter of a substantially larger relationship.”
CleanSpark is one of the few miners-turned-data-center-operators who still release monthly BTC production figures. In June, the company produced 614 BTC, down from 671 in May, as June’s average operating hashrate of 42.6 EH/s was 3.6 points below May’s figure.
In May, CleanSpark CEO Matt Schultz said his company was “building on mining, not moving away from it,” adding that mining will “pay the bills” until the AI bucks start rolling in. But in a CNBC interview last week, Schultz said CleanSpark’s share price was lagging in part due to investors’ perception of the company as a pure mining operator. Or, as Schultz called it, “the Bitcoin miner connotation that we’ve worn for a while.”
Bitdeer lets it ride in Nevada
The current king of BTC miners in terms of monthly production is Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR), which generated 990 BTC in June. That’s 69 more than May’s total, as Bitdeer’s self-mining hashrate hit 73 EH/s, topping the 70.7 EH/s of former champ MARA (NASDAQ: MARA).
June’s total represented a 388% rise over the same month last year, and the company expects more “momentum” in these figures in the coming months. Bitdeer now boasts 243,000 ASIC rigs in action, 12,000 higher than May, and more than twice June 2025’s total.
But Bitdeer continues to sell its BTC as fast as it comes in, leaving its ‘treasury’ at just 150 tokens at the end of June, down from 171 in May and just 10% of its stacks one year ago. Some of those token sales are fueling the company’s AI buildout, but Bitdeer is also putting down new mining roots in the U.S. of A.
On July 9, Bitdeer announced that it had broken ground on its new $36 million, 187,000-square-foot “advanced electronics manufacturing facility” in Sparks, Nevada. Bitdeer hopes to have the plant up and running by year’s end, after which the company’s first “domestic” ASIC manufacturing and assembly operation will pump out 10,000 of its SEALMINER rigs per month.
Given the industry’s AI pivot, it’s unclear precisely who will buy all these rigs, but if no one else steps up, Bitdeer will likely just add them to its own armada. Regardless, it allows the company to show it’s doing its bit to fulfill President Trump’s desire to ‘onshore’ ASIC-making operations and help make America the ‘mining capital of the world.’
Bitdeer isn’t ignoring the AI sector, announcing late last month that it had finally “executed a colocation lease agreement” for its data center in Tydal, Norway following months of negotiations. But Bitdeer continues to play coy as to the identity of its tenant, pending “the satisfaction of certain conditions precedent beyond Bitdeer’s control, including the completion of certain external customer and supplier arrangements by the counterparty.”
Dodging delisting
Canaan Inc. (NASDAQ: CAN) produced 64 BTC in June, down from May’s 90, but the company has other reasons to celebrate. Unlike other miners fire-selling their BTC, Canaan continues to stack its tokens, and the company’s BTC treasury hit a new record high of 1,867 tokens by the end of June.
Canaan also got a reprieve from being delisted from the Nasdaq exchange due to its share price falling below $1 last November and refusing to rise above it. On July 15, Canaan received an additional 180-day compliance period in which to boost that price above $1 and keep it there for a minimum of 10 consecutive business days. Canaan’s new deadline for compliance is January 11, 2027.
The threat of delisting is becoming commonplace with miners. The Trump-linked American Bitcoin Corp (NASDAQ: ABTC) conducted a 1-for-15 reverse split on July 2 after its share price fell below $1 in June. That split bought ABTC some time, but the shares continued to decline until this week’s BTC rally offered some badly needed upward momentum.Cango (NYSE: CANG) was put on notice by the New York Stock Exchange in March regarding its failure to maintain that $1 price. In June, Cango shareholders approved a plan to consolidate its shares, and this 1-for-10 reverse split was executed on July 20. The new shares closed Tuesday down 1.4% to $1.76, but how long they’ll be able to maintain that $1+ level remains to be seen.
IREN co-CEOs’ payday irks investors
IREN (NASDAQ: IREN) still derives the bulk of its revenue from mining, but mining has been on the decline, while the company’s AI Cloud division reported revenue rising 12-fold in its most recent quarterly report.
On July 20, IREN announced it was raising its annualized AI run-rate revenue target from $3.7 billion to over $4 billion. IREN co-founder/co-CEO Daniel Roberts said his firm’s AI Cloud capacity will hit 480MW this year, and the 2027 target is now 1.2GW, allowing IREN to broaden its customer base “across hyperscalers, enterprises, and AI developers.”
IREN’s bright future led to the company’s addition to the Russell 1000 Index of the 1,000 largest U.S. companies based on market capitalization. But the company’s July 1 decision to issue 9.1 million additional shares to Roberts and his brother Will (also co-founder/co-CEO) proved far more controversial, with shareholders expressing unease over the size of the brothers’ windfall.
Famed short-seller Jim Chanos tweeted his thoughts on the issue, noting that the ~$800 million value of these shares equals 17% of IREN’s cumulative adjusted profits over the shares’ four-year vesting period. Other critics noted that the Roberts brothers were now set to earn more than the CEOs of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), and Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) over the next four years.
IREN’s shares slipped ~10% on the news, and while they’ve regained some of that ground, shareholders remain unimpressed. The pushback grew loud enough that IREN’s independent board chair issued a statement on July 8 defending the share award, saying the company’s “single biggest risk” is the possibility of “losing either or both of the Founder-CEOs who built this business and have the drive and skill to deliver what is in front of it.”
Data center opposition growing
While miners that pivot to AI enjoy greater interest from investors, there may be storm clouds on the horizon, as popular opinion is turning seriously sour on the data center industry.
A new Politico survey found that 41% of Americans would oppose building a data center within three miles of their homes, a 13-point rise in this view since January. The number of those who would support such projects declined 13 points to 24% over the same period.
As with everything in the U.S., opinion on this subject varies depending on how you vote. Just 22% of voters who chose Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election now support data centers (-14 points from January), while these voters’ opposition has grown 20 points to 53%.
Only 34% of Trump voters support local data centers (-11 points), while 33% are opposed (+8 points). But 43% of self-identified ‘MAGA’ (Make America Great Again) Trump voters support local data centers compared to just 26% of ‘non-MAGA’ Trump voters (both figures are 12 points below January’s support).
The survey was conducted a few days before New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an order on July 14 establishing “a temporary moratorium on data centers in New York while the state develops higher standards for data center development and benefits blueprint to support localities.”
The order justified the move by citing the “unprecedented growth in demand” for new data centers and the “legitimate concerns” regarding their “energy use, water use, water quality, air quality, noise, lighting, quality of life, and other potential environmental impacts.”
TeraWulf (NASDAQ: WULF) is a miner that has pivoted so hard it doesn’t expect to be still mining “beyond this year.” On July 6, TeraWulf announced a new $19 billion deal with AI developer Anthropic for TeraWulf’s Justified Data campus in Hawesville, Kentucky.
But following Hochul signing her order, TeraWulf shares fell 7% in a single day. TeraWulf has its Lake Mariner campus in Barker and another site (Cayuga/Lake Hawkeye) under development in Lansing. Investors appeared unsure how Hochul’s order might affect the latter site’s future.
TeraWulf CEO Paul Prager tweeted that the order “WILL NOT affect Cayuga/ Lake Hawkeye’s schedule, and WILL certainly affirm the inherent suitability and value of the site for a large scale data center.” Prager called Hochul’s order “a positive step,” adding that Hawkeye is “a multi-year development, and we’re also evaluating on-site power which aligns directly with the Governor’s priorities for new generation.”
Hochul’s move has yet to be followed by other governors, and TeraWulf’s share price has since regained some of its lost ground. But with public opinion turning negative fast, not to mention a midterm election campaign just getting underway, the AI boom could soon face new headwinds, particularly if Democrats have a strong showing come November.
Past is prologue
One final thing: the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) recently issued its Annual Economic Report, in which it compared the current AI investment boom to historical booms such as the 19th-century buildouts of canals and railways, the 20th-century expansion of electrical grids, and the dotcom bubble.
All of these booms “shared one common trait: a genuine technological breakthrough that attracted capital in excess of what commercial returns could ultimately justify. These episodes ended with an eventual reversal in investment, inducing economy-wide recessions. The scale and pace of the current AI investment boom accompanied by expectations of large productivity payoffs bear resemblance to these precedents, highlighting potential downside risks in the near term.”
What will miners-turned-data-center-operators pivot to then?
In order for artificial intelligence (AI) to work right within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it needs to integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures data input quality and ownership—allowing it to keep data safe while also guaranteeing the immutability of data. Check out CoinGeek’s coverage on this emerging tech to learn more why Enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of AI.
Watch: The Truth About Mining Profitability
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