Major Bitcoin miners have stopped selling their mined coins after a $30 billion AI infrastructure spending spree eliminated the need to liquidate holdings, with the Miner Position Index collapsing to -1.2 in September and exchange inflows from miners nearly drying up.
The flow of freshly mined Bitcoin to exchanges has nearly vanished. Public miners have shifted into a strict holding mode, with the Miner Position Index registering -1.2 in September — far below its annual average — after a $30 billion AI infrastructure buildout eliminated the cash shortfall that had driven summer distribution.
"Once the main tranches for purchasing AI equipment were covered and the need to drain their crypto wallets disappeared, miners immediately hit pause," Rapha Zagury, chief executive officer of Tether-backed treasury company Twenty One Capital, said at the Bitcoin Asia 2026 conference in Hong Kong on Aug. 28. Zagury described the current stretch as the first sustained "bear market in hash rate" in Bitcoin's history, with network hashrate sliding from a peak near 1.3 zettahashes per second late last year.
The shift traces to a structural transformation across the mining sector. Public miners have collectively reduced realized hashrate by 15 percent over the past six months, shutting down roughly 56 EH/s of computing power. Cango and IREN accounted for 68 percent of the decline, disconnecting 29.5 EH/s and 21.9 EH/s respectively during the first half of the year, with additional reductions at Cipher, Riot, TeraWulf and CleanSpark. Mining difficulty fell 11.16 percent in February and another 10.09 percent in June as operators switched off.
The capital expenditure behind this pivot is staggering relative to mining revenue. Combined spending by the six largest infrastructure providers on repurposing data centers for AI has exceeded $30 billion, outpacing their current operating revenue by nearly 15 times. That cash gap forced miners to sell aggressively during Bitcoin's August rally — the Miner Position Index briefly jumped to 2.8, a level historically associated with widespread profit-taking. But Bitfinex data for September shows the index has since collapsed to -1.2, well below the annual average, with the flow of coins from miner wallets to exchanges nearly dried up.
The AI pivot is reshaping mining economics at the company level. Core Scientific reported a negative 56 percent gross margin from self-mining in the second quarter, while its data-center colocation business generated nearly $80 million in gross profit. TeraWulf derived about 71 percent of quarterly revenue from high-performance computing leases. Keel Infrastructure shut down all of its U.S. Bitcoin mining operations as it prepares sites for AI workloads, ending the period with roughly $819 million in liquidity. Bitdeer signed a 16-year AI infrastructure agreement worth about $4.7 billion for 121 megawatts at its Tydal campus in Norway, a contract that could reach $8 billion with extensions. Hut 8 secured a $9.8 billion, 15-year lease covering 352 megawatts at its Beacon Point campus in Texas.
For the Bitcoin market, the halt in miner selling removes a persistent supply overhang. The surge in distribution during the summer proved to be a one-off episode tied to AI equipment purchases, and miners have now settled into a holding posture. With the Miner Position Index in deeply negative territory and exchange inflows from miners effectively zero, the supply side of the market has tightened considerably.
The structural question is whether this dynamic persists. Zagury noted that "if you look at the public mining companies out there, there really isn't anybody staying the course to mine bitcoin at scale." For miners that remain committed, however, shrinking competition is an advantage — surviving operators capture a larger share of network production as competing hashrate disappears. The tension is that AI may be pulling infrastructure away from Bitcoin while simultaneously improving economics for the miners that stay.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
