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CoinShares prices AI compute at three times bitcoin mining on the same megawatt
Its second-quarter report puts the network hashrate about 50% below trend and blames the post-halving cycle and Texas power prices alongside the AI pivot, so the 50% measures the halving and the power bill as much as it measures who is outbidding whom.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- CoinShares' second-quarter mining report puts the Bitcoin network hashrate roughly 50% below its expected growth trend, the longest sustained decline since China's 2021 mining ban.
- The report puts high-performance computing revenue at roughly $1.5 million per megawatt a year against about $500,000 per megawatt for bitcoin mining.
- TeraWulf's 20-year data-centre lease with Anthropic could generate upwards of $19 billion in revenue, the kind of deal the report credits to miners diversifying into AI.
- Core Scientific paid $41.9 million to cancel its agreement with Block's Proto division, giving up roughly 15 EH/s of 3nm mining chip deliveries to prioritise AI infrastructure.
- Nolan put the weighted average ex-tax cash cost of producing one bitcoin among listed miners at approximately $75,500 in the second quarter.
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Why it matters
- contradiction The same report calls the contraction both an AI repricing and a normal post-halving pattern made worse by Texas power costs, so the 50% measures the halving and the power bill alongside any AI outbidding of mining for megawatts.
- constraint On Nolan's account, buyers who need US capacity are bidding for buildings that exist. The scarce thing is the interconnect a miner already holds, and the buyer pays the premium.
- decision A mining board that signs an AI tenant swaps a price it can trade weekly for a counterparty it is tied to for two decades, and reversing that costs more than the revenue gap covers.
Per megawatt, the gap CoinShares reports is three to one [4][1]. On a site with 100 powered megawatts, the two revenue lines sit about $100 million apart each year [2].
TeraWulf's lease with Anthropic runs 20 years and could bring in upwards of $19 billion [5]. Averaged across the term, that is roughly $950 million a year [3], which at $1.5 million per megawatt would need about 630 megawatts to produce [4]. The 630 comes out of the two published numbers. Neither company disclosed that capacity.
The hashrate shortfall has more than one cause. The same CoinShares report says contractions of this sort match what past cycles did at this point after a halving [2], and it attributes the drop partly to rising Texas energy costs at the beginning of the year [12]. An operator who reads the 50% as a clean measurement of AI outbidding mining is also reading in the halving and the power bill.
Luke Nolan, the report's author, describes a supply problem in buildings. "A new constraint has emerged in the US that we believe is fundamentally repricing the asset base of listed miners: it is becoming increasingly difficult to build new data centres at all," Nolan wrote [10]. "The market has responded by placing a substantial premium on capacity that already exists," he wrote [11].
The mining side of the comparison is thin at the moment. Against Nolan's weighted average ex-tax cash cost of about $75,500 a coin, a price near $78,000 [9] leaves the average listed miner roughly $2,500 per bitcoin [5], before tax and before capital spending. At the end of June, with the price below $60,000, some operators were producing at more than $100,000 a coin [8].
CoinShares treats the pivot as reversible. "A sustained rise in the bitcoin price could alter this calculus dramatically, however, and prompt some miners to recommit capacity to mining," the report said [13]. Gizmodo notes that operators who have converted entirely would find the trip back much harder if bitcoin runs at new highs [16]. Nolan wrote that the shift is not a sign of systemic failure for Bitcoin, and called AI a "lucrative and seemingly secular tailwind" for public miners [15].
Two numbers belong on the same page for anyone holding powered capacity. One is revenue per megawatt per year under each tenant. The other is the price and the calendar of converting the site back. The revenue spread does not pay for that, and Core Scientific's exit fee is the closest thing in the record to a disclosed price for reversing a conversion [6]. Hashrate has already recovered from its earlier 2026 lows, and the next halving falls in 2028 [14].
What to watch
- Whether any operator that converted a site to AI moves capacity back to mining, and what the conversion costs.
- Whether other listed miners buy their way out of chip orders, and what those exit fees run to.
- Whether CoinShares' next report still puts high-performance computing at three times mining revenue per megawatt.