A recovery in the Bitcoin price is unlikely to bring AI-focused miners back to hash production, according to CoinShares. The firm argues that 15-year data-center leases and cancelled mining-hardware orders have made the industry’s shift toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads largely structural.

CoinShares’ assessment reframes the migration from Bitcoin mining to AI as a long-term reallocation of GPU-adjacent compute capacity rather than a cyclical response to the Bitcoin price. The conclusion appears in the firm’s Bitcoin Mining Report | Q2 2026, published September 15, 2026, and credited to Luke Nolan. CoinShares said a BTC recovery is unlikely to reverse the transition because some sites are committed to long-duration leases and some mining-hardware orders have been terminated.

The firm presented the view as an assessment rather than a guaranteed outcome. It describes a return to mining as unlikely, not impossible, and its reasoning applies primarily to operators that have physically committed infrastructure to AI tenants. The conclusion concerns the allocation of energized megawatts and compute capacity; it does not suggest that every listed miner will abandon Bitcoin.

The economics behind the shift

CoinShares estimates annualized AI profit at approximately US$1.5 million per megawatt, compared with US$0.5 million per megawatt for Bitcoin mining. These are estimates from the report, not independently audited profitability figures. However, the roughly threefold difference helps explain why energized capacity may move toward AI inference and HPC tenants.

Estimated annualized profit per MW:

• AI: approximately US$1.5 million
• Bitcoin mining: approximately US$0.5 million

CoinShares also reported that Core Scientific paid US$41.9 million to terminate its agreement with Proto, cancelling roughly 15 EH/s in hardware deliveries. The company-specific figure is attributed to the CoinShares report, while the underlying filing was not independently verified in the source material.

CoinShares estimated the weighted-average, pre-tax cash cost of producing one bitcoin among listed miners at approximately US$75,500 in Q2 2026, close to the prevailing spot price cited in the report. The limited margin compared with the estimated US$1.5 million-per-MW AI alternative underpins CoinShares’ allocation analysis.

The firm’s assessment also follows a separate CoinShares caution that persistent inflation, or sticky CPI, may limit Bitcoin’s upside and keep pressure on mining economics.

Bitcoin mining capacity in transition

CoinShares said at least 35 EH/s is scheduled to leave the listed-miner cohort. It identified Riot, MARA, HIVE and Bitdeer as more flexible operators and therefore the likelier sources of renewed mining investment. In CoinShares’ assessment, any new investment in Bitcoin mining is more likely to come from those companies because they have retained greater flexibility.

On the AI side, the report counted more than US$100 billion in disclosed AI and HPC contracts, compared with approximately US$1.1 billion in annualized AI/HPC revenue. More than 4 GW of capacity is contracted, while roughly 550 MW is billing. The difference between contracted and billing capacity points to a multi-year expansion of AI compute infrastructure that remains ahead of its revenue curve. The pace at which contracted capacity becomes operational and billing therefore provides an important measure of how quickly the reported AI/HPC expansion is translating into revenue.

Bitcoin price backdrop

At press time, Bitcoin traded at $76,454, down 2.7% over 24 hours, with a market capitalization of approximately $1.54 trillion. During the period covered by CoinShares’ report, hash price recovered to around US$38/PH/s/day as BTC rebounded to roughly US$77,000 from a June low of US$27.7/PH/s/day.

The report does not establish that any move in Bitcoin’s price or in miner-share prices was caused by its September 15 publication. No event-specific market-reaction data was verified. The Fear \u0026 Greed Index stood at 69, in Greed territory, but that was a daily reading and not evidence of a market reaction to the CoinShares report.

Market participants considering macroeconomic factors such as the Federal Reserve vote and Treasury yields should therefore treat the migration thesis as an infrastructure assessment rather than a near-term price signal.

More broadly, CoinShares’ analysis indicates that an increasing share of compute capacity previously dedicated to SHA-256 hashing is being reassigned under 15-year AI leases. That shift is reinforcing a supply of energized, grid-connected capacity for inference and HPC tenants instead of on-chain proof-of-work operations.

Source: AI Crypto Core

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Cryptocurrency and digital asset markets carry significant risk. Always conduct your own research before making decisions.