06-19-2026 
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The ‘pivot to AI’ by block reward miners is no guarantee of financial success, as competition for hardware, energy, and customers is proving increasingly cutthroat.
- Miners’ AI pivot turning into a Darwinian struggle
- Bitdeer’s BTC production soars while AI ambitions struggle
- Tether’s mining ops not (yet) the biggest in the world
- OMAN aims to win where Bhutan failed
As of midday Thursday, the average all-in production cost of mining a single BTC token (including the need to periodically replace older ASICs with more modern rigs) stood at just under $74,000, while the token’s price was hovering just under $63,000.
As ugly as that math is, it’s a far better scenario than what existed last week, when the gap between those two figures was as high as $23,000. But last weekend’s 10% decline in network mining difficulty—the 11th-largest in network history and the second-largest this year, behind only February’s weather-related plunge—left the average number of hashes required to ‘find’ a block on the BTC network at just under 125 million.
That decline, combined with a modest increase in BTC’s price, led us to this current situation. But the next network difficulty adjustment on June 27 is expected to produce a 4% rise to nearly 130 trillion hashes, while BTC’s price is retreating after a less-than-reassuring press conference from the new chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve regarding the future direction of interest rates.
In other words, miners’ ongoing ‘pivot to AI’ is a matter of survival for all but the few ‘pure play’ miners who insist that they can make more money as their rivals either reduce or outright halt mining activity. But there are headwinds facing those doing the pivoting, particularly in building out the data center infrastructure required to service third parties’ AI and other high-performance computing (HPC) needs.
A report this week from VanEck’s head of digital asset research, Matthew Sigel, flagged “a ~$50B near-term funding gap” separating miners’ AI/HPC ambitions from their ability to deliver on the promises they’re making to customers/investors. Sigel estimates that these operators’ long-term capex requirements could top $221 billion, “making access to equity, debt and partnership capital a key differentiator.”
To be sure, not a week goes by without multiple funding announcements from miners-turned-AI/HPC infrastructure suppliers, many of them in the multi-billion range. Miners are also routinely announcing multi-billion-dollar deals to service the AI/HPC needs of other companies.
But Sigel says only 25% of promised leased capacity has actually been delivered to date, and the competition for funding, GPUs, land, and access to cheap power and water supplies is only getting tougher. VanEck urges investors to identify which miners are building on time and on budget, while noting the “declining relevance” of actual mining to most of these companies’ operations.
Sigel also broke out which miners’ share prices are more “BTC-sensitive,” in part due to the sizable token ‘treasuries’ they maintain. MARA (NASDAQ: MARA), which currently holds 36,303 BTC (down from 53,250 at the start of the year), is described as “almost a pure BTC proxy, with BTC-sensitive value equal to ~98% of its market cap, reflecting its large treasury and mining-led model.”
On the evening of June 15, blockchain analyst Lookonchain tweeted that MARA appeared to have reversed its BTC sell-off position by acquiring another 1,000 tokens. But Sigel squashed this speculation the following morning, tweeting that these tokens were “returned lent coins, not open market purchases.” Sigel noted that MARA was focused on building out its AI/HPC infrastructure, and acquiring more BTC “is the last thing on their mind.”
Bitdeer kicking ass on BTC, struggling on AI/HPC
MARA currently rules the BTC hashrate chart with 72.2 EH/s, but Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR) is not far behind with 70.2 EH/s. And while MARA’s hashrate is up by one-third year-on-year, Bitdeer has shot up 416% over the same span as it has chosen to make mining a greater focus of its operating profile.
Bitdeer also manufactures mining ASICs, but as everyone pivots to AI, there are fewer buyers for its products. Faced with the likelihood of these rigs collecting dust, Bitdeer began mining with a vengeance. On June 18, Bitdeer announced that its May production hit 921 BTC, a 370% increase from the same month last year. That’s both a reflection of Bitdeer’s increased hashrate as well as the dwindling number of miners competing to ‘find’ those tokens.
Meanwhile, Bitdeer’s AI Cloud unit hit $91 million in annual recurring revenue last month (if you believe in such fanciful metrics), despite the company having yet to sign a colocation deal for its data center in Tydal, Norway. (Bitdeer insists that it’s in “advanced negotiations” with a prospective customer, but they’ve been saying this for a while.)
Bitdeer’s stateside AI ambitions also aren’t off to the best start. On Tuesday, hundreds of residents turned out to protest Bitdeer’s bid to establish its largest U.S. base of operations to date: a 750MW complex on a 257-acre site in Ohio’s Shalersville Township (home of former Cleveland Brown QB Bernie Kosar).
Bitdeer has sought to assure residents that it will abide by local noise, power, and water rules. The community has a data center moratorium that expires in November, but local trustees claim Bitdeer has bluntly informed them that legal attempts to block their construction are likely to fail. Welcome to the neighborhood.
Tether mining: it’s complicated
Tether, issuer of the market-leading USDT stablecoin, has interests in a number of mining/data center businesses, including Bitdeer, in which Tether built up a significant stake by mid-2025. But times change, and Bitdeer informed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week that it had sold 627,021 Bitdeer shares in two transactions earlier this month, reaping about $12.7 million in the process.
That sale reduces Tether’s Bitdeer shares to 37,729,510, representing 19.7% of the company’s Class A shares. That’s well off the ~25% Tether held at its peak last year, but above the 18.1% Tether’s Bitdeer position had been reduced to following a series of sales that coincided with the BTC token’s run-up to its peak $126,000 price last October. Tether began (re-)buying the dip in November and acquired more during February’s BTC price slump.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino claimed last year that his company would be “the biggest Bitcoin miner in the world” by New Year’s Eve 2025. Like most things with Tether, it can be hard to discern shit from Shinola, but a quick glance at the hashrate distribution charts suggests this goal went unrealized.It’s possible that Ardoino defined ‘biggest’ as ‘most influential,’ aka owning the infrastructure that underpins other miners’ operations. The company launched an open-source Mining Operating System (MOS) earlier this year, and it received an upgrade this week with the 0.2.0 version of its Mining Development Kit.
In April, Tether announced it had teamed up with miner Canaan Inc. (NASDAQ: CAN) and ACME Swisstech on “a new class of modular, high-density mining systems” built around “application-specific hash board modules, integrating them into its own control architecture, thermal management systems, and software stack.”
Tether also holds an 8.2% stake in Antalpha Platform Holding, a financial services firm linked to Bitmain, the dominant ASIC manufacturer. And the Tether-owned Adecoagro (NYSE: AGRO), a money-losing South American agribusiness with access to tons of cheap electricity, is reportedly planning to launch a modest mining operation (1,280 rigs) on July 1 in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul using energy sourced from sugarcane biomass.
And then there’s the tangled tale of Northern Data AG, a miner turned AI/HPC operator that Tether acquired in 2023. After Northern Data got into legal trouble in Europe, Tether sold the company’s Peak Mining unit to an entity later revealed to be controlled by Tether execs (including Ardoino).
Tether later sold the rest of Northern Data to the video-sharing platform Rumble (NASDAQ: RUM), in which (conveniently) Tether had taken a near-controlling stake the year before. On June 17, Rumble announced that it had closed its acquisition of Northern Data and now controls 85.2% of the company.
Rumble hailed the acquisition of Northern Data and its 22,000 NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) GPUs as “instantly” turning Rumble into “a meaningful, growing player in the AI compute-as-a-service, power, and data center markets.” The acquisition also provides “an immediate and quantifiable uplift to Rumble’s financial profile,” which is a good thing, because Rumble is a freaking money pit.
Rumble’s Q1 earnings report showed revenue of $25.5 million in the three months ending March 31, while expenses totaled $64.5 million, resulting in a net loss of $30.3 million. That’s an improvement over the $32.7 million Rumble lost in Q425, but clearly, what they’re doing ain’t working. Whether Northern Data can help Rumble pivot to profit remains to be seen.
OMFG Oman
BTC’s inability to produce a new narrative that might allow it to reclaim its 2025 price highs has led numerous entities that once embraced the ‘treasury’ concept to sell some or all of their holdings before the token falls any lower.
The government of Bhutan, which at one point held ~13,000 BTC, was in the news this week after Arkham analysts flagged onchain data showing Bhutan’s wallets transferring another 533 BTC to the Binance exchange, presumably to be sold for cash. The transfer reduces the government’s holdings to 1,750 BTC.
Bhutan acquired much of its original BTC stack through government-funded mining operations that utilized the country’s vast renewable energy sources. But the digital wallets into which Bhutan deposited the fruit of this labor haven’t received any significant inflows in over a year, suggesting that the government believes the activity no longer makes economic sense.
It’s not quite the same approach, but this week saw the Sultanate of Oman announce the establishment of the “sole official and mandatory mining pool for all licensed cryptocurrency mining companies” in the country.
In conjunction with Enegix Global—which previously helped launch the state-sponsored btcpool.kz in Kazakhstan—and Omani-based Frontier Technologies LLC, the Sultanate has launched Omanhash.om, which it expects will coordinate ~10 EH/s of hashrate in its initial phase. The totality of Oman-based miners currently generates ~30 EH/s, representing ~3% of the global hashrate.
Oman says private operators have invested over US$700 million in mining/data center operations in the Sultanate’s Salalah Free Zone since 2022. Omanhash.om reflects the state’s goal of “consolidating this capacity within a regulated, transparent national framework.”
The Sultanate’s desire appears to be ensuring that it remains aware of what its licensed miners are up to, including what they’re earning. Whether this will spark an influx or an exodus remains to be seen. Hey, what’s the weather like in Bhutan?
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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