Bitcoin price recovery may be good news for investors, but it is not necessarily enough to bring bitcoin miners back to their old business.
According to CoinShares, publicly traded mining companies that have shifted computing power toward artificial intelligence infrastructure are unlikely to reverse course, even if Bitcoin stages a stronger recovery.
“A BTC recovery is unlikely to reverse the AI transition,” CoinShares said in its second-quarter bitcoin mining report published Tuesday.
The reason is less about sentiment than economics. AI infrastructure is currently generating about $1.5 million in profit per megawatt for the companies CoinShares tracks, compared with roughly $500,000 per megawatt from Bitcoin mining.
That gap makes a return to mining harder to justify, particularly for operators that have already signed long-term AI and high-performance computing deals.
Core Scientific, for example, paid nearly $42 million to cancel an agreement covering 15 EH/s of next-generation mining hardware. Other operators have committed sites to AI and HPC leases that can run for more than 15 years.
In total, at least 35 EH/s of computing power is already scheduled to leave the publicly listed mining group. That represents about 4.7% of Bitcoin’s current network hashrate of roughly 750 EH/s.
Bitcoin price can recover, but the AI money is harder to ignore
The economics of Bitcoin mining have become increasingly unforgiving.
CoinShares estimates that the average cash cost of producing one bitcoin reached around $75,500 during the second quarter, while Bitcoin ended Q2 at approximately $58,400.
Miners also faced weaker returns from their underlying computing power. The monthly average hash price — the revenue generated by a unit of mining capacity — dropped to a record low of $27.70 per PH/s per day in June.
Some of those pressures have eased since then. Bitcoin’s recovery to around $77,000 has pushed hash price to roughly $38 per PH/s per day, putting most operators back above cash breakeven.
But better mining economics do not automatically undo strategic decisions that have already been made.
Several companies are now further along in their AI transition than a temporary improvement in Bitcoin price is likely to reverse. Keel, formerly known as Bitfarms, stopped mining altogether in June. IREN expects to finish its exit by the end of 2026, while Cipher Digital is likely to leave the mining business by the end of 2027.
TeraWulf is also reducing its remaining Bitcoin mining operations, with 145 MW still being wound down.
For those companies, the question is no longer simply whether mining can become profitable again. It is whether mining can compete with a different use for the same infrastructure — one that currently offers substantially higher profits and, in some cases, comes with contracts extending well into the future.
CoinShares does expect a Bitcoin price rebound to encourage some additional mining investment. But the report points toward miners such as Riot, MARA, HIVE and Bitdeer, which have maintained more flexible business models rather than committing their capacity entirely to AI.
That creates a divide within the mining industry. Some companies can still respond to stronger Bitcoin economics by adding capacity, while others have already redirected power, sites and capital toward AI infrastructure.
The Bitcoin price may therefore become less decisive for the miners that have made that transition.
The underlying hardware can still run on electricity, but the business surrounding it has changed. For companies with long AI leases and significantly higher returns per megawatt, returning to Bitcoin mining may look less like a comeback and more like giving up a better-paying customer.