Public bitcoin miners cut their combined hashrate 13.4% over two quarters as companies idle machines and repurpose sites for AI computing. Excluding Bitdeer, the cohort's largest offset, the rest of the tracked miners' hashrate fell 21.2% between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026, even as colocation and AI revenue climbed at several firms.
Public miners tracked by TheEnergyMag produced a combined realized hashrate of 319.0 EH/s in the second quarter of 2026, down from 368.3 EH/s in the fourth quarter of 2025 and 344.4 EH/s in the first quarter of 2026. That is a 13.4% decline in six months, a faster contraction than the wider Bitcoin network, whose quarterly average hashrate fell from 1,071 EH/s to 957 EH/s over the same period, a 10.6% reduction.
Bitdeer masks a sharper drop elsewhere
Bitdeer remained the cohort's largest offset. Its realized hashrate rose 44% from the fourth quarter to the second, reaching 63.0 EH/s, driven by its own SEALMINER production pipeline. By June, the company had 73 EH/s of self-mining capacity and 15.9 EH/s of co-mining capacity, and it produced 990 bitcoin during the month, 388% more than a year earlier.
Excluding Bitdeer, however, the rest of the cohort's realized hashrate fell 21.2%, from 324.6 EH/s to 255.9 EH/s. MARA and American Bitcoin kept expanding too, but their additions were not enough to offset reductions at Cango, Cipher, Keel Infrastructure, Core Scientific, TeraWulf and IREN.
Colocation revenue overtakes mining at two firms
The shift shows up clearly in second-quarter earnings. Core Scientific generated $136.7 million of colocation revenue in the quarter, almost five times its $27.5 million of bitcoin mining revenue, with colocation supplying 83% of quarterly sales, up from 67% in the first quarter.
TeraWulf followed a similar path. Its HPC lease revenue rose to $31.9 million, or 71% of total revenue, against $12.8 million from bitcoin mining. The rest of the sector trails further behind: Riot Platforms reported $23.2 million in data center revenue against $113.7 million from mining, while Bitdeer generated $14 million from AI cloud services compared with $197.1 million from mining-related activities.
Cango shows how fast the pivot can move
Cango illustrates the pace of change. The company entered bitcoin mining in late 2024 and reached 50 EH/s of deployed capacity during 2025, before decommissioning inefficient machines and leasing out hashrate. Its realized hashrate then fell from 44.8 EH/s in the fourth quarter of 2025 to 31.3 EH/s in the first quarter, with second-quarter capacity estimated to decline further to 16.5 EH/s, a 63% reduction in six months.
Keel Infrastructure went furthest. During the quarter, it completed decommissioning of all its U.S. bitcoin mining operations to prepare for data center construction, though mining continues in Canada during the phased transition. Unlike China's 2021 mining ban, which removed roughly half the network's computing power before it had almost fully recovered by December, this contraction has no single trigger. Only one halving has occurred since the post-China expansion began, and the current pullback stems from weak mining economics competing with an alternative use for capital and electricity.
Source: Bitcoin.com News
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