Bitcoin Miners’ AI Shift May Create New Overhang, | Crypto News
Lekker Capital CIO Quinn Thompson argues on X that collapsing mining economics, mixed with a growing shift by public miners toward AI and high-performance compute, might flip company BTC treasuries into a contemporary source of market provide.
“A large underappreciated headwind for Bitcoin is the disaster that which is mining economics. The only way this heals is through a decline in hashrate, which is being spearheaded by the AI compute first movers like CORZ, WULF, CIFR, IREN, etc.,” Thompson wrote.
The chart Thompson shared, frames the issue visually. It exhibits mixture bitcoin holdings across major listed miners climbing sharply through 2024 and 2025 before rolling over in 2026. Thompson’s argument just isn’t that the AI pivot is bearish in structural phrases.
On the opposite, decrease hashrate and less uneconomic competitors might improve mining industry health over time. His level is that the transition itself is dear, and that capex-heavy AI buildouts might power miners to liquidate BTC that had beforehand been handled as strategic treasury.
“While helpful to long-term health and sustainability of the network economics, it presents a dilemma for prices in the near-term as Bitcoin miners hold almost 80,000 Bitcoin on their balance sheets. As these companies pivot away from BTC mining, they 1) need capital to fund the AI buildout capex requirements and 2) have no reason to hold any BTC on their balance sheet (not that they should have before either),” he argued.
Bitcoin Miners Pivot To AI
The 2025 filings and public data make that argument more concrete. Core Scientific’s fourth-quarter outcomes confirmed the business combine tilting away from mining and toward AI-related infrastructure: self-mining income fell to $42.2 million from $79.9 million a 12 months earlier, while colocation income rose to $31.3 million from $8.5 million. Management said the decline in hosted mining mirrored the “continued strategic shift” to high-density colocation. For full-year 2025, Core generated $402.5 million of proceeds from promoting digital belongings and ended the 12 months with 2,537 BTC on its stability sheet.
TeraWulf gives an even cleaner read-through. The company said that in 2025 it “solidified HPC hosting as its primary growth engine,” signed more than $12.8 billion in long-term buyer contracts, and constructed a platform with 522 essential IT megawatts under contract. Yet the legacy mining business was still being monetized as that buildout took form: fourth-quarter digital asset income was $26.1 million, versus $9.7 million in HPC lease income, and the company’s year-end digital asset rollforward exhibits 1,496 BTC mined, 1,500 BTC disposed of, and only 3 BTC left on the stability sheet at Dec. 31, 2025.
Cipher and IREN show two other variations of the same development. Cipher said it elevated its focus on HPC in 2025 and signed two HPC tenants for a mixed 600 MW of data heart capability. It also offered bitcoin for roughly $214.7 million during the 12 months. By year-end, Cipher had categorized $94.9 million of Black Pearl mining rigs as held for sale after signing a sublease to transition the positioning to an HPC tenant. IREN, by distinction, has already taken the treasury issue largely off the desk: with roughly 99,900 GPUs put in or on order as of Dec. 31, 2025, it said it “typically liquidate[s] all the Bitcoin we mine daily” and therefore held no bitcoin on its stability sheet at year-end.
MARA issues for a different purpose. It just isn’t yet as far along as Core, TeraWulf, Cipher or IREN in changing mining websites into a full AI/HPC business, though it had deployed its first ten AI racks at Granbury by November 2025 and later announced a Starwood partnership for AI and HPC infrastructure. But MARA is the treasury heavyweight in the group, and its own 2025 disclosures moved in Thompson’s direction: the company said it started promoting bitcoin in the second half of 2025, offered about 4,076 BTC for $413.1 million during the 12 months, and still ended 2025 with roughly 53,822 BTC.
That is the stress in Thompson’s thesis. A miner-led shift into AI can scale back hashrate stress and improve the long-run economics of bitcoin mining. But the bridge from mining to AI is capital-intensive, and the 2025 filings show that bridge is already being funded with BTC gross sales, miner disposals and website conversions. For bitcoin, that means an industry adjustment that could also be constructive later can still appear like overhang now.
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $72,322.
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