The industry that secures Bitcoin is becoming an industry that rents GPUs
A Bloomberg report published today lays out how thoroughly the public Bitcoin mining sector has pivoted. Listed miners are on track to generate as much as 70% of revenue from AI and high-performance computing by the end of this year, up from roughly 30% today. More than $70 billion in cumulative AI and HPC contracts have been announced across the public mining sector.
This is not a sideline anymore. It is the main business. Bitcoin mining, the activity these companies were built around, is becoming the secondary revenue line.
How we got here
The math stopped working. After the 2024 halving, block rewards were cut in half while hashrate kept climbing. Energy costs in the US and Europe rose. Transaction fees collapsed to near zero at multiple points this year. CoinShares reported hashprice at a five-year low in its Q1 2026 mining report, with roughly 20% of older machines now running at a loss.
Meanwhile AI hyperscalers are desperate for power and cooled real estate. Miners happen to own both.
The contract stack
The deals speak louder than any press release. Core Scientific signed an expanded $10.2 billion, twelve-year agreement with CoreWeave. Hut 8 inked a $7 billion, fifteen-year AI infrastructure lease at its River Bend campus, with Google-backed financing. Bitdeer drew its treasury down to zero in February. Core Scientific sold roughly 1,900 BTC for $175 million in January and has signaled plans to liquidate what remains of its balance sheet.
These are not treasury rebalances. They are capital redeployments away from Bitcoin mining.
Why long-term holders should pay attention
Network security is paid for by block rewards and fees. Those rewards are paid to miners. If miners decide the rational move is to allocate new capex and the best sites to AI workloads, the marginal hash that would have secured the next block simply does not get switched on.
CoinShares forecasts 1.8 zetahashes by year-end 2026 and 2 zetahashes by March 2027 only if Bitcoin recovers to $100,000. If price stays below $80,000, the firm expects hashprice to keep falling and the network hashrate to decline as miners exit. That is a conditional forecast, and the condition is a much higher Bitcoin price.
The counter-argument
This is not an emergency. A smaller, more efficient miner base does not automatically mean a weaker network. Difficulty adjusts. Private and non-listed miners, especially in Paraguay, Ethiopia and parts of Central Asia, continue to expand. Retail and industrial operators outside the public markets are under no pressure from quarterly earnings calls to chase HPC revenue.
There is also a case that hybrid miners, running AI during peak power prices and Bitcoin during cheap off-peak, actually improve grid economics and make mining more sustainable, not less. Block subsidies declining over time was always going to force this conversation. The halving schedule is doing what it was designed to do.
What this means for the next two years
Three things worth tracking:
Where the hash is. As public miners reweight toward AI, the share of network hashrate controlled by listed North American firms is likely to shrink. That shifts geographic and political concentration. Whether it shifts toward more resilient or more fragile jurisdictions is the open question.
Miner selling pressure. Public miners historically sold a share of mined BTC to cover opex. Several are now selling from treasury to fund AI buildouts. That is a different supply dynamic, and it arrives at the same time ETFs are net buyers. One offsets the other, until it does not.
The 2028 halving. Subsidy cuts in half again in roughly two years. If 70% of public miner revenue is already non-Bitcoin by then, the halving becomes a minor event for those firms. For the network, it becomes the moment where fees actually have to do real work.
Bitcoin Gate Take
The network will be fine. It always is. But the people securing it are quietly becoming people who happen to secure it as a byproduct of running AI data centers, and that shifts the incentive structure in ways that are not priced in yet. If you are holding Bitcoin for decades, assume fees matter more than they ever have. The subsidy era is ending whether anyone wants it to or not.
For long-term holders modeling how Bitcoin fits into a retirement plan, this is a reminder that the network's economics are changing underneath the price chart. The Bitcoin Gate calculator lets you stress-test accumulation scenarios against different long-run growth assumptions.