Bitcoin’s seven-day hashrate has remained 316 days below its record, the longest drought in a decade, even as BTC rallied 34.9% to above $81,000. This divergence between rising prices and falling hashrate reflects a structural shift as some operators redirect power and data-center capacity toward AI and high-performance computing instead of waiting for mining margins to recover. IREN cut self-mining capacity from 50 EH/s to 23.2 EH/s while developing AI cloud services, and Riot Platforms signed a roughly $9 billion, 20-year compute agreement with Anthropic. These long-term commitments change the economics of a mining recovery: power previously dedicated to mining can no longer return as easily when Bitcoin becomes more profitable. Hashrate stands at about 914 EH/s, roughly 20.6% below its October 2025 peak, and the historic price rally has not been enough to bring shut-down machines back online.
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