08-12-2026 
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Many block reward miners may be putting BTC in their rearview mirrors, but the road ahead to their artificial intelligence (AI) destination isn’t free of potholes.
- Miners not the only ones ditching BTC for AI
- Bitdeer’s mining output hits new highs, but losses grow
- Riot Platforms’ mining revenue down, AI revenue/deals up
- Keel Infrastructure ‘demolishes’ mining ops, warns no more revenue this year
The BTC network’s mining difficulty rate rose ~1% on August 8 and currently requires an average of 127.5 trillion hashes (mathematical guesses) to ‘find’ a new block and claim the 3.125 BTC block reward. The current projection for the next adjustment on August 22 is for another increase of ~1.4%.
Rising difficulty, coupled with BTC’s fiat price stuck in a narrow band of US$60,000-$65,000 for two months and counting, means the economics of mining are only getting worse. As of the evening of August 11, the average all-in cost of mining a single BTC token—including depreciation of ASIC mining rigs and the constant need to replace older, slower rigs with newer, faster ones—exceeds the value of the token by ~$13,000.
CleanSpark (NASDAQ: CLSK) is one of the few miners honest enough to publish its full mining cost structure, and the company’s most recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing shows the “direct cost to mine, including non-cash depreciation and financing costs” during the three months ending June 30 was $96,277.
Compare that with the average revenue from each BTC mined during this period ($71,692), and CleanSpark’s all-in costs represent 134.3% of revenue generated. That’s a significant hike from the 87.5% differential CleanSpark reported in the same period last year.
Small wonder, then, that miners are frantically ‘pivoting’ to the more reliable revenue from operating data centers for AI and other high-performance computing (HPC) tenants. As CleanSpark CEO Matt Schultz put it in last week’s earnings call, the company’s “legacy” mining operations are helping CleanSpark “evolve into something profoundly different.”
It’s not just miners making this shift. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that “individual traders and hedge funds alike [are] dumping bitcoin and other tokens to chase AI stocks.” With traders losing interest in pumping BTC’s price, hopes for a return to mining’s profitable glory days are fading fast. As Bloomberg Intelligence commodity strategist Mike McGlone put it: “What’s happening in crypto is the purge is just getting started.”
For the moment, the bloom is still on this AI/HPC rose, but the potential halt to new data center construction announced last week in Texas signals that the explosive growth the sector has enjoyed won’t last forever. Public perception of data centers was never all that great, but support has taken a noticeable dive this year as facilities drive up local utility prices and drive neighbors mad with excessive noise violations and (in some cases) increased air pollution.
Meanwhile, miners’ breathless AI deal announcements are having less impact on share prices than they did a couple of years ago. All of which suggests that, while it’s not an imminent threat, miners that successfully pivoted to AI may ultimately need to pivot somewhere else.
Bitdeer’s big AI deal can’t halt share price tumble
This week saw three more mining operators release their Q2 earnings results, and our coverage begins with Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR), the current leader in mining hashrate after usurping former kings MARA (NASDAQ: MARA).
Bitdeer generated Q2 revenue of $228.8 million, but soaring costs resulted in an operating loss of $101.7 million. An income tax benefit helped lower net losses to $92.3 million, but that’s still nearly 50% larger than the loss in the same period last year. For the first half of 2026, net losses are $251.8 million, nearly 6x the losses in the first half of 2025.
The losses came despite Bitdeer mining 2,694 BTC during Q2, up from just 565 tokens in Q225, and production totals increased each month during Q2 (783, 921, 990). Bitdeer’s fleet of active mining rigs more than doubled year-on-year to 243,000, but average miner efficiency fell nearly 40% over that same span.
Breaking down the Q2 revenue figure, self-mining accounted for $168.4 million, while co-mining added $25 million. But sales revenue from the SEALMINER rigs that Bitdeer manufactures plummeted from $69.5 million in Q225 to just $400,000 in this most recent quarter.
Q2’s near-elimination of rig sales is both a reflection of the industry-wide lack of interest in mining as well as global chip shortages due to the ongoing U.S.-Iran conflict. Bitdeer recently broke ground on a new SEALMINER manufacturing hub in Sparks, Nevada, and the new facility is expected to start churning out 10,000 new rigs per month by the end of the year. But who will buy them?
Asked by an analyst as to how the market should model ASIC sales going forward, CFO Michael Potter said that “right now,” given “the very challenging hashrate and our desire to expand our ability to do self-mining and co-mining, we made the decision to use [existing inventory] internally.”
Potter added that Bitdeer would likely be “deploying about the same amount of mining machines per month going forward … I don’t think it’ll be greatly accelerating from where we are, but I think steady deployment at a reasonably high rate as we’ve shown over the last few quarters.”
On the plus side, Bitdeer’s AI Cloud revenue shot up more than 10x year-on-year to $14 million, and last week the company finally revealed (sort of) the name of its new AI client for the company’s data center in Tydal, Norway. The deal is with Volta Tydal AS, a subsidiary of Volta, an NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) Cloud Partner, but the actual client was described only as “a leading AI lab.” (Bloomberg reported that this client is Anthropic.)
The $4.7 billion deal will see Bitdeer’s Tydal Data Center AS subsidiary supply 121 megawatts for an initial 16-year period with an eight-year renewal option worth another $3.3 billion.
Bitdeer’s share price crashed by 20% to $8.70 on Monday, but Q2’s net loss was only part of this souring investor sentiment. The main anchor weighing down the stock was Bitdeer’s announcement of plans to sell up to $1 billion worth of its Class A ordinary shares, with the obvious dilution implications for shareholders.
Riot Platforms strikes data center deal as mining revenue falls
Next up on the Q2 parade is Riot Platforms (NASDAQ: RIOT), who were supposed to release their earnings numbers last week but at the last minute punted it to this week for unexplained reasons.
Riot reported revenue of $174.2 million, up nearly 14% year-on-year and 8% higher than the first quarter of 2026. But Riot booked a net loss of $237.3 million in Q2, a dramatic turnaround from the $216 million profit one year ago, but an improvement from Q1’s $500 million loss.Q2’s mining revenue totaled $113.7 million, down nearly one-fifth year-on-year. Riot’s average all-in cost of mining a single BTC token in Q2 was $90,631, while the production value of that token was $71,667. That makes the cost of mining a single token 126.5% of its value, up from 92.4% in Q225.
Tellingly, Riot’s outlay for new mining rigs was just $25.2 million in Q2, only about 30% of what it spent in Q125. For the first half of 2026, new rig outlay is around one-half of the total from H125.
Equally telling is the $23.2 million in revenue Riot generated from data center operations in Q2, up from nil in Q225. The H1 data center revenue total is $56.4 million, also up from nil a year ago.
Riot booked $37.3 million in ‘engineering’ revenue, nearly quadruple the Q225 total. This segment involves Riot’s design/manufacturing/deployment of data center infrastructure via its ESS Metron and E4A Solutions divisions. For H1, engineering brought in $59.5 million, more than twice H125’s total.
Riot’s Q2 report was accompanied by news of a 20-year, 191-megawatt data center lease with “a leading frontier AI lab” (again, the company that must not be named is Anthropic) at its Rockdale, Texas facility. The deal, which Riot says is worth $9.1 billion in its initial term, includes two five-year extension options (at the tenant’s discretion) that could bring the total value to over $16 billion.
Riot’s BTC treasury stood at 11,380 tokens as of June 30, down from 15,679 at the end of Q1. On Monday’s earnings call, Riot CEO Jason Les said the proceeds from BTC sales “remain our primary source of funding for operations and the equity component of our data center capital expenditures.”
Referencing the Rockdale facility, Les noted that it currently hosts Riot’s first data center tenant, Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD), alongside BTC mining, but the mining will only continue “until we have the right lease or set of leases to take the balance of that capacity there.”
For the record, not one analyst inquired about Riot’s mining operations on the earnings call. Riot’s shares closed Monday down 5.5% to $19.40, but rebounded Tuesday, rising 4.3% to $20.24.
Keel completes ‘demolition’ of US mining ops
Our final Q2 report comes from Keel Infrastructure (NASDAQ: KEEL), the company formerly known as Bitfarms before February’s emphatic declaration that “we are no longer a Bitcoin company.”
In case you doubted their word, the report states up front that one of Keel’s Q2 ‘highlights’ was completing “the decommissioning of all U.S. Bitcoin mining operations in preparation for HPC site construction.” Keel still has ‘legacy’ mining operations in Canada but is “working to secure the legal and regulatory approvals to convert its energy purchase agreements” from mining to AI/HPC.
As of June 30, Keel had $15.9 million worth of mining rigs and related electrical components it’s attempting to sell. Keel also sold 1,085 BTC between April 1 and August 7, reducing its treasury to 1,861 tokens.
Keel reported revenue of $30.4 million in Q2, half of the sum generated in the same period last year. The cost of that revenue, along with other expenses (including losses on the sale of its BTC), led to an operating loss of $140.8 million. Fortunately, a $77 million gain on its derivative assets and liabilities boosted net losses to a slightly more tolerable $65 million.
On the analyst call, Keel CEO Ben Gagnon pointed to Keel’s site in Moses Lake, Washington, where “the Bitcoin mine that stood there before is gone, completely removed.” Gagnon said Moses Lake will prove “a milestone site” for Keel, the first to be “fully permitted, the first site to come online, the first site to generate HPC revenues.” That said, the site is unlikely to be fully commissioned until 2027, and potential tenants have yet to sign leases.
Asked whether the U.S. BTC shutdown means analysts should be “zeroing out revenues for the balance of the year,” Gagnon said the lone remaining mining site in Sherbrooke, Quebec “might contribute two or three Bitcoin a day.” But yes, Keel’s projected liquidity “assumes that the Bitcoin business provides no cash over the course of the year.”
Speaking to CNBC, Gagnon didn’t mince words, saying Keel was in the process of the “complete demolition” of its mining legacy as it converted facilities to AI/HPC. AI/HPC offers miners “a much bigger opportunity,” and there’s a “much greater value to be had by converting” mining assets and energy allocations to AI/HPC, which offer “better” and “much more predictable revenues” than mining.
‘Demolition’ could describe the 12.4% decline in Keel’s share price on Monday. The shares slipped another 3.2% on Tuesday but remain up nearly 50% since the company announced its top-to-bottom rebrand in February.
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