- Listed Bitcoin miners averaged about $75,500 in cash costs per BTC before tax, while June hash price fell to $27.70 per PH/s/day.
- Miners are shifting toward AI and HPC, with IREN’s AI cloud revenue reaching $70.5M and TeraWulf’s HPC leases $31.9M.
- U.S. grid restrictions are increasing the value of energized sites as miners pursue more than 4GW of contracted AI/HPC capacity.
Bitcoin miners faced cash costs above realized prices in Q2 2026 as hash price fell to $27.7 per PH/s/day in June. According to CoinShares, listed miners averaged about $75,500 per Bitcoin before tax, while network hashrate fell 27% from its October peak. Several operators accelerated moves from mining toward AI and HPC.
Mining Costs Widen Across Listed Miners
Costs varied widely across listed miners. American Bitcoin had the lowest ex-tax cash cost at $43,851 per Bitcoin, followed by HIVE at $60,192 and Bitdeer at $61,051. IREN posted a $64,667 ex-tax cash cost, while CleanSpark reached $71,995 and Riot Platforms $74,955.
MARA’s cost reached $86,126, exceeding its $70,315 realized revenue by about $15,800 per Bitcoin. However, Hut 8’s $43,103 cash cost included a $28.1 million deferred tax benefit. Excluding that benefit, its cash cost rose to $73,197 per Bitcoin.
Miners Cut Fleets as AI Projects Expand
The shift became clearer during the quarter. Core Scientific paid $41.9 million to cancel 15 EH/s of Proto hardware from Block’s mining division.
Keel, formerly Bitfarms, stopped mining June 29 and sold 1,085 BTC for $75 million. Cipher Digital sold $123.4 million of Bitcoin during the first half, while IREN recorded $450.4 million in mining-hardware impairments.
Meanwhile, IREN’s AI cloud revenue reached $70.5 million, above its $66.7 million mining revenue. TeraWulf reported $31.9 million from HPC leases, representing 71% of total revenue.
Grid Restrictions Raise Value of Energized Sites
Regulatory restrictions also expanded across the United States. ElectricChoice tracking found at least 225 data-center moratoriums or restrictions across 30 states, with 151 still active. New York introduced a statewide pause on environmental permits for facilities of 50MW or more.
Maine banned new data-center construction in April, while counties restricted projects in Ohio, Michigan, Georgia and Indiana. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated the U.S. interconnection queue at about 2,600GW. Data centers accounted for 87% of ERCOT’s 410GW large-load queue.
Meanwhile, more than 4GW of AI/HPC capacity had been contracted among covered miners, but only about 550MW was billing. Disclosed backlogs exceeded $100 billion, against less than $800 million in annualized colocation revenue.
