Bitcoin Miners Capitulate: $12.5B in AI Deals Signals Permanent Hashrate Exodus
Cipher Mining and Hut 8 abandon pure-play mining strategies for $12.5B in AI contracts as Bitcoin struggles at $78k.
The industrial backbone of the Bitcoin network is leaving.
Bitcoin struggled to hold $78,000 Tuesday, down 38% from its October peak, but the real story isn’t the price action. It is the infrastructure flight. Two massive infrastructure deals confirmed what the derivatives market has been signaling for months: the era of pure-play Bitcoin mining is effectively over.
Hut 8 and Cipher Mining have executed a combined $12.5 billion pivot to artificial intelligence, locking in 15-year guaranteed revenue streams that Bitcoin’s volatility can no longer compete with.
The Receipt: 15 Years, Guaranteed
The numbers are staggering. Cipher Mining secured a $5.5 billion lease with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver 300 MW of compute power starting in 2026. This isn’t a pilot program; it is a complete reallocation of power capacity that was originally scoped for SHA-256 hashing.
Hut 8 followed with an even larger play: a $7 billion, 15-year lease for its River Bend campus, backed directly by a Google financial backstop. The deal repurposes 245 MW of capacity for AI workloads.
The math is brutal. AI data centers are generating up to 25x higher revenue per kilowatt-hour than Bitcoin mining.
Revenue Mix Inversion
For miners with high-performance computing (HPC) contracts, the revenue model has inverted. In early 2025, Bitcoin mining accounted for 85% of total revenue. By the end of 2026, that figure is projected to collapse to less than 20%.
This is not a temporary bearish rotation. It is a permanent infrastructure arbitrage. With Bitcoin trading at $78,000 and energy costs rising, the “security budget” of the network is being outbid by the insatiable demand for LLM training clusters.
Network Implications
The immediate result is a stagnation in hashrate growth. As 545 MW of prime power capacity moves to AWS and Google, the difficulty adjustment mechanism will face its first true stress test of the AI era. Security is no longer just about hardware availability; it is about energy opportunity cost.
