Bitcoin Miners Add AI Capacity as Second-Quarter Costs Exceed Price

Bitcoin miners are expanding artificial intelligence and high-performance computing businesses as mining costs outpaced Bitcoin’s quarter-end price, while company disclosures show they continue to produce the cryptocurrency and build computing capacity.

Listed miners’ weighted average pretax cash cost to produce one Bitcoin was about $75,500 in the second quarter of 2026, compared with Bitcoin’s $58,400 price at quarter-end. June’s average hash price — miner revenue per unit of computing power — fell to $27.70 per petahash per day, a record low. The industry average does not represent a break-even estimate for every miner.

Core Scientific paid $41.9 million to cancel an order for next-generation mining equipment that would have represented 15 exahashes per second of planned capacity.

Bitdeer is growing its AI Cloud business while continuing to mine Bitcoin. The company reported an annualized AI Cloud revenue run rate of $86 million for August, with 4,328 GPUs deployed and 92% utilization. A 10-year data center services agreement added 65.1 megawatts at its Johor, Malaysia, campus, bringing reported AI Cloud capacity there to 86.8 megawatts. The run rate is an annualized measure, not revenue recorded for August.

Bitdeer mined 1,310 Bitcoin in August, up 249% from a year earlier, and reported a self-mining rate of 79.9 exahashes per second. CleanSpark mined 593 Bitcoin that month and reported 50 exahashes per second of operational capacity. It held 13,703 BTC as of Aug. 31, including 3,951 BTC posted as collateral or receivables tied to derivatives transactions.

The figures show different approaches to power and data center resources: Bitdeer is adding AI capacity alongside mining, while Core Scientific canceled planned mining equipment. Miners are also pursuing data center businesses as they contend with higher costs and weaker mining revenue per unit of computing power.