Bitcoin’s hashrate has spent 316 days below its record high as miners channel their power toward artificial intelligence.
The seven-day network average hovered near 914 exahashes per second (EH/s) on Aug. 31, representing a roughly 20.6% drop from its October 2025 peak of 1,151.6 EH/s. This prolonged absence of a new peak marks the longest stretch in a decade, surpassing the previous maximum of 252 days recorded in the same Blockchain.com data series.
This slump came on the heels of months marked by weak mining economics, summertime power curtailments, and a growing migration among certain operators toward AI and high-performance computing (HPC). Twenty One Capital CEO Raphael Zagury has characterized the period as Bitcoin’s first prolonged “economic hashrate bear market.”
That characterization has taken on added significance because Bitcoin has already staged the sort of price rebound that historically breathes new life into mining.
While the network hashrate dropped 10.1% between late June and late August, BTC rallied 34.9% over the same timeframe, climbing above $81,000. This marks only the second divergence of its kind since 2012.
Typically, rising Bitcoin prices boost the dollar value of block rewards, prompting miners to power back up the machines that became unprofitable during market troughs. This time around, however, the response has been noticeably muted.
The fundamental difference is that the power and data center capacity exiting the Bitcoin network now has viable alternative destinations.
Bitcoin’s rally has not brought enough machines back
Classic recovery signals are already popping up across the mining sector.
VanEck estimated that the network hashrate sat at roughly 885 EH/s during the week ending Aug. 11, with mining difficulty lingering 18.3% below its November 2025 high. That represented the sharpest difficulty drawdown since China implemented its mining ban in 2021.
Meanwhile, the Puell Multiple—which evaluates the dollar value of daily Bitcoin issuance against its one-year average—sat at roughly 0.73 over the prior 30 days. This placed the metric in the 16th percentile, signaling exceptionally weak revenue conditions for miners.
Such pressures forced marginal equipment offline, setting the stage for Bitcoin to operate as intended.
When hashrate drops, the protocol automatically dials down difficulty, allowing remaining operators to compete for identical block subsidies using less computational muscle. Improved profit margins can then entice dormant capacity back online.
Signs of this recovery flickered in August.
According to VanEck, the Aug. 8 difficulty adjustment ticked upward by 1%, marking the first positive shift in its tracked sequence as hashrate rebounded toward 925 EH/s. A subsequent difficulty reduction of 1.31% on Aug. 23 delivered another wave of relief.
By Aug. 31, data from Hashrate Index pegged the seven-day hashrate at 915 EH/s, up 3.3% from 886 EH/s a week prior. Blocks were processing every 9 minutes and 56 seconds, sitting nearly dead-on with Bitcoin’s 10-minute target.
Hashprice also climbed to $39.36 per petahash per second (PH/s) daily, eclipsing its 30-day average of $34.63.
Ordinarily, this confluence of a roughly 35% Bitcoin rally, decreased difficulty, and stronger hashprice would make reactivating machines increasingly lucrative. Even so, the hashrate stays depressed relative to its all-time high.
AI changes what happens after a miner switches off
For several industry players, powering down Bitcoin equipment no longer entails waiting for mining margins to recover.
For instance, IREN scaled back its operational self-mining capacity from 50 EH/s in June 2025 to 23.2 EH/s by June 2026, decommissioning legacy miners to channel power and data center infrastructure into AI Cloud Services. By the end of June, the company had roughly 40 megawatts of AI Cloud capacity up and running.
Similarly, TeraWulf has redirected operational capacity toward high-performance computing, reporting 81 MW of critical-IT capacity on June 30, with 102 MW energized by July alongside 145 MW of traditional Bitcoin mining infrastructure.
Demonstrating the long-term nature of these alternative commitments, Riot Platforms finalized a massive, 20-year compute contract with Anthropic valued at approximately $9 billion in August.
This dynamic fundamentally alters the economics of a mining recovery.
While a rig taken offline due to low hashprice can easily be booted back up when Bitcoin turns profitable, power dedicated to a long-term AI client cannot return nearly as fast—even if Bitcoin surges and difficulty drops.
Years spent assembling mining footprints have made the sector uniquely appealing to AI developers, as miners already command substantial power allotments, grid ties, and data center facilities engineered for dense computational demands.
Admittedly, the hashrate slump cannot be blamed entirely on this structural pivot. Seasonal power curtailments, particularly in Texas, drove down mining output during high-demand windows, while operators simultaneously scrapped inefficient fleets as margins eroded.
AI’s true significance lies in how it dictates the fate of that capacity once it goes offline.
Better mining economics now have to compete with AI
The upcoming chapter of Bitcoin’s hashrate recovery will determine how much capacity was merely idling versus how much has permanently moved on.
Certain miners continue to push aggressive expansions.
MARA posted an energized hashrate of 70.3 EH/s as of June 30, while Bitdeer achieved 76.7 EH/s of self-mining capacity in July. Riot even managed to bump its deployed mining capacity from 38.5 EH/s to 44.4 EH/s while simultaneously pushing deeper into AI.
| Company | Observed operating signal | Implication for hashrate recovery |
|---|---|---|
| IREN | Mining capacity fell from 50 EH/s to 23.2 EH/s; about 40 MW of AI Cloud capacity was operating at June 30 | Converted infrastructure may not return through difficulty relief alone |
| TeraWulf | 102 MW of critical-IT capacity was energized in July alongside 145 MW of legacy mining capacity | HPC can absorb operating capacity while mining continues |
| Riot | Deployed mining capacity rose from 38.5 EH/s to 44.4 EH/s while 25 MW of critical-IT capacity was delivered | AI infrastructure and mining can expand in parallel |
| MARA | Energized hashrate reached 70.3 EH/s at June 30 | Large-scale mining growth has continued |
| Bitdeer | Self-mining hashrate reached 76.7 EH/s in July | New capacity is still entering the network |
As a result, the ecosystem is fractured: some operators keep deploying Bitcoin hardware, others pivot infrastructure toward enterprise compute clients, and a few attempt to scale both simultaneously.
Bitcoin’s native recovery mechanisms remain fully functional. Difficulty adjustments continue to process, blocks are found close to schedule, and the recent climb back toward 915 EH/s confirms that portions of the missing hashpower are returning.
Nevertheless, the 316-day drought indicates that this response has fallen short of restoring late-2025 network highs.
The central question now is whether improving Bitcoin prices, hashprice conditions, and favorable difficulty metrics can pull enough dormant machines back online to break the streak.
If they cannot, the answer may increasingly reside outside the Bitcoin ecosystem altogether—with infrastructure that once waited out bear markets now contractually bound to stay elsewhere.
