A Big Chunk of the Bitcoin Mining Industry Is Losing Money
A new report from CoinShares put a number on something the mining industry has been quietly dealing with for months.
A new report from CoinShares put a number on something the mining industry has been quietly dealing with for months. Roughly 15% to 20% of the global Bitcoin mining fleet is currently operating at a loss. That is not a projection, it is a description of where things stand right now, and the conditions that got the industry here have been building since the April 2024 halving.
The math is fairly straightforward. Hash price, which is what miners earn per unit of computing power per day, fell to around $28 to $30 per PH/s/day in early 2026. At that level, running older machines gets expensive fast. CoinShares identified the S19 XP as the rough cutoff. Anything less efficient than that, combined with electricity costs at or above 6 cents per kWh, puts an operation in the red. That combination covers a meaningful share of the global fleet, particularly smaller operators and those in higher-cost regions who did not upgrade their hardware during better times.
The weighted average cost to produce a single Bitcoin among publicly listed miners came in at just under $80,000 for Q4 2025. Bitcoin spent a significant portion of that quarter trading well below that figure, which meant a lot of the industry was not just stressed, it was underwater on a per-coin basis.
The response has been predictable. Publicly listed miners collectively reduced their BTC treasury holdings by more than 15,000 coins from peak levels. Core Scientific sold around 1,900 BTC in January alone and signaled plans to liquidate nearly all remaining holdings. Bitdeer cut its treasury to zero in February. Riot moved roughly 1,800 BTC in December.
The more interesting development is where some of these companies are pivoting. More than $70 billion in AI and high-performance computing contracts have now been announced across the public mining sector. CoinShares estimated that listed miners could derive up to 70% of their revenue from AI by the end of 2026, up from around 30% today. The infrastructure already exists, and for many operators, pointing it at something other than Bitcoin is increasingly the better financial decision.
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