Bitcoin miners are trading hash rate for AI in 2026. Hut 8 shares jumped as much as 14% in July after the company signed a $9.8 billion lease that fully commercializes its Texas data center c
Bitcoin miners are trading hash rate for AI in 2026. Hut 8 shares jumped as much as 14% in July after the company signed a $9.8 billion lease that fully commercializes its Texas data center campus. It followed a $7 billion, 15 year Fluidstack lease for its Louisiana campus.
The rush makes sense when you look at the economics of both high-performance compute (HPC) and mining.
CoinShares data show listed miners’ average cash cost reached about $75,500 per Bitcoin in the second quarter, above Bitcoin’s quarter-end price of roughly $58,400. Hash price hit a record low of $27.7 per PH/s in June. CoinShares estimates AI infrastructure earns miners about $1.5 million in profit per megawatt, against roughly $500,000 for mining.
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NiceHash, the hash rate marketplace director Filip Primec described to TheStreet Roundtable last year, is not going into the AI space.
“We are still very much committed to Bitcoin mining and proof of work,” Primec said at Token2049 in Singapore, calling it the company’s “bread and butter.”
He said the two markets don’t map onto each other.
"AI compute doesn’t have proof of work,” he said. “It’s very diversified… the whole market has to mature a little bit.”
Primec also pointed to pricing differences in the two markets today.
The spot price of hash rate, he said, reflects “the average cost of energy, the average cost of hardware. Because miners will generally not operate unless they are at least marginally profitable.”
That discipline is visible in the data. When hash price slid from $63 to about $31 per PH/s, unprofitable machines were switched off in a wave of capitulation.
AI compute plays by different rules.
“AI compute right now runs on even bigger funds from publicly traded companies. So they’re not really running on profit,” he said. “It’s rather inflated.”
The four largest US hyperscalers’ capex is projected to consume 92% of operating cash flow in 2026, up from 41% in 2023.
Primec is not saying that AI is a bad business for miners, since landlords like Hut8 and MARA are cashing in. His argument is that the price end users pay for AI is subsidized, while the hash rate is set by people who must break even.
For investors trying to value computers, he says Bitcoin’s hash rate is the cleaner benchmark.
