Bitcoin miners are loss-making at a price of $76.000

Listed Bitcoin miners on average spent more than they earned in the second quarter of 2026. That is evident from the quarterly report from CoinShares. The weighted average production cost per Bitcoin came to around $75.500, while the Bitcoin price stood at $58.400 at the end of the quarter. Bitcoin now trades around $76.300, but even that level barely covers, or does not cover, the costs of several large miners.

In brief:

• Listed miners posted an average loss in Q2 2026: production costs of $75.500 per BTC exceeded the market price of $58.400.
• Core Scientific paid $41.9 million to cancel mining hardware and is focusing on data centres for AI.
• Several miners are quitting Bitcoin mining entirely and selling their reserves.

Cost price far above market price

According to CoinShares, the average hash price fell in June to a historic low of $27.7 per PH/s per day. The pressure on the sector is therefore greater than ever. The chart shared by Wu Blockchain highlights just how large the differences between individual miners are.

ABTC produces relatively cheaply at a cost of $45.361 per Bitcoin, while CIFR and WULF spend $216.783 and $174.727 respectively per Bitcoin mined. Companies such as MARA ($85.893) and Riot ($74.911) sit in between, but at a Bitcoin price of $58.400 they too are well above breakeven. The recent price rise towards $77.000 offers some relief for part of the sector, but does not solve the structural cost problem.

Miners pay to stop

The pressure is prompting miners to actively scale down. Core Scientific paid $41.9 million to terminate a contract with Block’s Proto division, cancelling around 15 EH/s of new 3nm chips. These are the most energy-efficient mining chips ever produced to date. The company is deliberately running its standalone mining at a loss, with a gross margin of -56%, purely to meet ongoing power commitments while sites are converted into data centres.

Keel, the former Bitfarms, is the first listed miner that will report zero mining revenue in the third quarter. The company stopped mining at Moses Lake in April and closed three other sites on 29 June. Keel also sold 1,085 Bitcoin for $75 million and has indicated it wants to sell the remaining 1,861 coins before the end of the year.

Cipher Digital, formerly Cipher Mining, has decided to stop investing in new mining capacity. The company expects mining to be largely wound down by the end of 2027. In the first half of 2026, Cipher Digital sold Bitcoin worth $123.4 million, but booked a loss of $47.7 million because the coins were sold below the average cost price.

Scarce power capacity as a new business case

The transition to AI data centres is for many miners not only an escape from loss-making mining, but also a strategic move. Regulation is making it increasingly difficult to build new data centres in the US. At least 30 states have now introduced 225 moratoria or restrictions on data centre development. In July 2026, New York became the first state to announce a statewide pause on environmental permits for facilities of 50 MW or more.

The queue for connection to the US power grid stands at around 2,600 GW, more than the country’s total installed capacity. That makes existing and already connected sites valuable. A recent acquisition of three fully leased AI data centres in Northern Virginia was valued at around $27 million per MW, while comparable but not yet leased mining sites sometimes trade below $3 million per MW.

IREN has indicated in its annual report that the transition from mining to AI will be largely completed before the end of 2026. Companies with contracts for AI or HPC capacity are valued on average at 12.9 times expected revenue, against 3.7 times for miners without such contracts. More than $100 billion in announced order books currently generates only around $1.1 billion in annual AI revenue, which indicates that many companies are still in the build-up phase.