Third-quarter earnings from listed bitcoin miners are best read as a price signal. Power is being priced by its best use, and at current hashprice a megawatt leased to AI earns roughly twice what the same megawatt earns mining bitcoin, by Blockhead's estimate. Three of the nine companies reviewed here now take most of their revenue outside mining, and the others are selling bitcoin from their treasuries to fund the same move.
That matters in two ways. For the economics of mining, it shows that margins are thin enough for capital to leave even where operations are efficient. For bitcoin, it means a new class of structural seller, and a hashrate base that is shifting towards the operators that stay.
Hashprice, the daily revenue a petahash of hashrate earns, closed October at $33.18, down 17.5% from $40.24 on October 1, according to MillionMiner . MARA, one of the lowest-cost operators, reported a cost of $30.8 per petahash per day, so by its own metric the margin at the end of October was about 7%. At its owned sites, power at $0.04 per kilowatt-hour cost $39,674 per bitcoin mined, about 55% of the $71,688 average price it received, according to its call transcript and filing summary .
A megawatt leased to AI is a different business. Core Scientific is billing for 485 MW, which it says represents more than $700 million of annualized colocation revenue, its release showed . That is about $1.44 million per megawatt a year, at an adjusted EBITDA margin of 57%. At 15 to 20 joules per terahash, a megawatt of mining runs 50 to 67 PH/s and earns $0.6 million to $0.8 million a year at $33 hashprice, before about $0.35 million of power at $0.04 per kilowatt-hour.
On those assumptions, which are in line with industry baselines and exclude depreciation, an AI tenant pays 1.8 to 2.4 times the revenue per megawatt and leaves much more after power. In standard AI data center contracts, electricity is structured as a pass-through cost (the tenant pays the power bill directly on top of the lease rent). Therefore, the landlord pockets nearly the entire lease amount as gross margin, compared to a miner who must subtract the power bill from their volatile crypto rewards.
Tenants also fund some of the build: CoreWeave paid $180.9 million of Core's capital spending in the first half, its 10-Q showed .
The same gap shows up inside one company. HIVE reported a 34% gross margin on bitcoin mining and 51% on High-Performance Computing (HPC) and AI services, and targets 80% EBITDA margins on new GPU clusters, according to its call transcript . It also cited lower market values for mining equipment in its 8-K , where a non-cash impairment helped produce a $78.7 million GAAP loss. Falling ASIC values are a second signal that the hardware side of mining is being repriced.
The other difference is the type of revenue. Mining revenue floats with price and network difficulty: a 37% fall in the average bitcoin price took $94.8 million off MARA's quarterly revenue. AI leases run 15 to 20 years. Core Scientific reports more than $24 billion of contracted revenue in its investor deck , Cipher $16.6 billion, TeraWulf a roughly $19 billion lease at one campus and Hut 8 about $26.6 billion, Rolling Out reported , more than $85 billion between them on definitions that vary.
Compared to Bitcoin mining—where your hardware depreciates to near zero every 3–4 years due to difficulty adjustments—an upgraded AI facility represents an infrastructure asset with a 15-to-20-year lifespan. The cost for this upgrade is capital intensity; transitioning a facility from Bitcoin mining to AI leasing is a classic high-CapEx, high-yield infrastructure upgrade. Essentially, the set-up has to be a Tier III data center standard.
The payback is consequently longer, but the terminal value of the real estate and power asset is vastly higher. Core spent $954.2 million on capital in the first half, and IREN posted a $263 million net loss in its fiscal first quarter.
The protocol issues about 450 BTC a day whatever miners do, so exits do not change supply. What changes is who holds the coins and who sells them. MARA sold 17,488 BTC in all this quarter, 7.8 times the 2,247 BTC it mined, according to its shareholder letter , and it plans further sales to fund AI infrastructure and meet note obligations. Riot sold 10,599 BTC in the quarter, and Hut 8 about 3,100 across the quarter and October. Together that is about 31,000 BTC, roughly $2.4 billion, or 69 days of new issuance, though the windows differ and the sales include treasury coins. Miners used to sell production to pay power bills. Now they are selling holdings to fund capital spending, which ties their selling to financing needs as well as to price.
Security is paid for from the same revenue pool. Daily miner revenue ran $34 million to $43 million in October, and hashrate was about 1,069 EH/s on November 2, roughly 8% below its record, according to MillionMiner. Exits are visible. Core Scientific has nearly 50% fewer miners online than at the end of 2025, its call showed , and IREN produced 402 BTC against 2,039 a year earlier. By Blockhead's arithmetic from the reported figures, the mining revenue of Core Scientific, TeraWulf and IREN together fell about 84% from a year earlier, to roughly $54 million from $334 million.
Core expects to complete its bitcoin wind-down in the fourth quarter and enter 2027 as a pure-play colocation provider. IREN also expects its transition from bitcoin mining to be "substantially complete" by end of 2026.
Operators that stay are gaining share: MARA's energized hashrate rose 18% and its share of block rewards rose to 5.4% from 5.0%.
There is a structural consequence. Each megawatt with an AI option now has a reservation price, and a convertible site will mine only while hashprice stays above what the same power would earn leased. That makes the floor under hashprice partly a function of AI power demand. Where AI wants the site, mining loses it, and difficulty adjusts to the capacity that is left. The dollar security budget still tracks the bitcoin price, which in MARA's case was 37% lower year on year.
The pivot swaps bitcoin-price risk for counterparty and political risk. CoreWeave, a major tenant of Core Scientific, reported revenue of $3.7 billion, up 168%, and a backlog of about $133 billion, and said it expects to finance most remaining spending through delayed-draw term loans matched to customer contracts, per its call transcript . Its five-year credit default swaps stood around 1,152 basis points on Tuesday after closing at 1,278 on Thursday, CNBC reported .
Core's colocation agreements with CoreWeave cover 590 MW built at CoreWeave's expense. On the power side, NRG said ERCOT prices were running nearly 40% below plan and that its 1.2 GW Texas data center project is on track, with an announcement expected by year-end, according to its call , and its shares fell 13.5% on November 4 after the Texas governor-elect pledged to halt new data center approvals, Averin's journal reported .
Analysts are cautious. Keefe Bruyette warned of a lease catalyst drought through early 2027, 24/7 Wall St. reported , and Bernstein cut targets on seven miners by up to 54% citing Texas. Blockhead covered the roots of both in August, when Wall Street became pickier about which miners could execute on AI and Texas ordered a data center audit .
Hashprice against the roughly $31 cost of efficient fleets is the first gauge: below it, more capacity leaves and difficulty falls. The second is miner selling, since MARA has said it will sell more. The third is the cadence of new leases, which the sector needs to keep growing, and the fourth is tenant and power financing, through CoreWeave's credit spreads and Texas policy. CleanSpark's first report under its quarterly schedule will show how a bitcoin-focused operator is holding up, so we will be looking out for that.
