316-Day Bitcoin Hashrate Drought Tied to AI Capacity Shift

Bitcoin’s mining network has gone 316 days without a new hashrate high, the longest stretch in a decade. The seven-day average stood near 914 exahashes per second on Aug. 31, about 20.6% below the October 2025 peak of 1,151.6 EH/s.

The decline followed months of weak mining economics, seasonal power curtailments and a growing shift by some operators toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Bitcoin’s price rose roughly 34.9% from late June through late August, reaching above $81,000, while network hashrate fell about 10.1% over the same period. Raphael Zagury of Twenty One Capital described the episode as Bitcoin’s first sustained ‘economic hashrate bear market.’

On-chain and market metrics show pressure on miners. An estimate put network hashrate near 885 EH/s for the week through Aug. 11, with mining difficulty about 18.3% below its November 2025 peak, the largest difficulty drop since China’s 2021 mining ban. The Puell Multiple averaged about 0.73 over the prior 30 days, which placed miner revenues in roughly the 16th percentile and indicated weak revenue conditions for miners.

The protocol has adjusted to falling hashrate. A difficulty adjustment on Aug. 8 increased by about 1% as hashrate moved toward 925 EH/s, and a later adjustment on Aug. 23 reduced difficulty by about 1.31%. By Aug. 31, Hashrate Index reported a seven-day hashrate around 915 EH/s, up about 3.3% from a week earlier, with blocks arriving near Bitcoin’s 10-minute target. Hashprice improved to about $39.36 per petahash per second per day, above its 30-day average.

Several operators have redeployed power and data-center capacity to AI and cloud computing. IREN cut installed self-mining capacity from 50 EH/s in June 2025 to 23.2 EH/s by June 2026 while commissioning roughly 40 megawatts of AI cloud capacity. TeraWulf reported 81 MW of critical IT capacity as of June 30 and 102 MW energized in July alongside 145 MW of legacy mining capacity. Riot Platforms signed an approximately $9 billion, 20-year compute agreement in August and reported deployed mining capacity rising to 44.4 EH/s from 38.5 EH/s while delivering 25 MW of critical IT capacity.

Power and data-center capacity committed to long-term AI customers cannot be reallocated back to mining quickly. A miner turned off because of low hashprice can be restarted when margins recover, but a site redeployed for AI generally remains in that role for years.

Some miners continue to add Bitcoin capacity. Marathon Digital reported 70.3 EH/s of energized hashrate at June 30, and Bitdeer reported about 76.7 EH/s of self-mining capacity in July. The industry currently includes operators expanding mining rigs, firms shifting infrastructure to computing customers, and companies pursuing both strategies.

Difficulty continues to adjust and blocks are being found near target intervals. The network remained below its October 2025 hashrate peak of 1,151.6 EH/s at the end of August.