Bitcoin’s network hashrate has remained below its record for 316 days as some miners redirect power and infrastructure toward artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing.
The seven-day average stood near 914 exahashes per second (EH/s) on Aug. 31, roughly 20.6% below its October 2025 peak of 1,151.6 EH/s. According to the Blockchain.com series, the period without a new record is the longest in a decade, surpassing the previous maximum of 252 days.
The decline followed months of weak mining economics, seasonal power curtailments and a growing shift among some operators toward AI and high-performance computing. Twenty One Capital CEO Raphael Zagury has described the period as Bitcoin’s first sustained “economic hashrate bear market.”
That assessment has gained importance because Bitcoin has already delivered the type of price recovery that has historically helped revive mining activity.
BTC rose 34.9% from late June through late August, reaching above $81,000, while network hashrate fell 10.1% over the same period. It was only the second such divergence since 2012.
Bitcoin Price vs Hashrate (Source: Onchain Insights)
Higher Bitcoin prices increase the dollar value of block rewards and typically encourage miners to restart machines that became uneconomical during a downturn. This time, however, the response has been weaker.
Estimated network hashrate was roughly 885 EH/s in the week through Aug. 11, while mining difficulty stood 18.3% below its November 2025 peak. That marked the largest difficulty drawdown since China’s 2021 mining ban.
The Puell Multiple, which compares the dollar value of daily Bitcoin issuance with its one-year average, averaged about 0.73 over the preceding 30 days. The reading placed it in the 16th percentile and pointed to unusually weak revenue conditions for miners.
Those pressures forced marginal machines offline. Bitcoin then began applying its built-in difficulty adjustment.
Bitcoin mining difficulty begins to ease
As hashrate declines, the Bitcoin protocol eventually reduces mining difficulty. This allows remaining miners to compete for the same block subsidy with less computing power, potentially improving margins and encouraging idle capacity to return.
Early signs of a rebound emerged in August.
VanEck said the Aug. 8 difficulty adjustment increased by 1%, marking the first upward move in the sequence it tracked as hashrate recovered toward 925 EH/s. Difficulty later fell 1.31% on Aug. 23, providing miners with another round of relief.
By Aug. 31, Hashrate Index placed the seven-day average at 915 EH/s, up 3.3% from 886 EH/s a week earlier. Blocks were arriving every 9 minutes and 56 seconds, almost exactly matching Bitcoin’s 10-minute target.
Hashprice had also improved to $39.36 per petahash per second per day, above its 30-day average of $34.63.
A roughly 35% Bitcoin rally, lower difficulty and improved hashprice would normally make restarting mining machines increasingly attractive. Yet network hashrate remains well below its record.
AI changes what happens when miners switch off
For some operators, shutting down Bitcoin mining machines no longer means simply waiting for mining margins to recover.
IREN reduced its installed self-mining capacity from 50 EH/s in June 2025 to 23.2 EH/s by June 2026 as it decommissioned miners and redirected power. The company reported 81 megawatts (MW) of critical IT capacity as of June 30 and 102 MW energized in July, alongside 145 MW of legacy Bitcoin mining capacity.
Riot Platforms demonstrated how long alternative commitments can last when it signed an approximately $9 billion, 20-year computing agreement with Anthropic in August.
That development changes the economics of a Bitcoin mining recovery. A machine taken offline because hashprice has fallen can be restarted when Bitcoin becomes more profitable. Power committed to a long-duration AI customer, however, cannot return to Bitcoin mining nearly as quickly, even if BTC rallies and mining difficulty declines.
Years of investment in mining operations have made the sector particularly attractive to AI developers. Mining companies already control substantial power allocations, grid connections and data-center sites designed to handle dense computing workloads.
The decline in hashrate cannot be attributed entirely to the AI shift. Seasonal curtailments, particularly in Texas, reduced mining activity during periods of high electricity demand. Operators also shut down inefficient fleets as profit margins deteriorated.
AI is becoming increasingly important because it can determine what happens to that capacity afterward.
Bitcoin mining economics now compete with AI demand
The next phase of Bitcoin’s hashrate recovery will show how much capacity is merely idle and how much has effectively moved to other uses.
Some miners continue to expand aggressively. MARA reported 70.3 EH/s of energized hashrate as of June 30, while Bitdeer reached 76.7 EH/s of self-mining capacity in July. Riot increased deployed mining capacity to 44.4 EH/s from 38.5 EH/s even as it expanded into AI.
The industry is therefore split among operators still adding Bitcoin mining machines, companies diverting infrastructure toward computing customers and businesses pursuing both strategies.
Bitcoin’s recovery mechanism remains intact. Mining difficulty continues to adjust, blocks are arriving close to the target interval and the recent rebound toward 915 EH/s shows that some hashpower is returning.
However, the 316-day drought indicates that the recovery has not yet been strong enough to restore the network’s late-2025 peak.
The key question is whether improving Bitcoin prices, hashprice and mining difficulty conditions can bring enough idle machines back online to end the record drought.
If they cannot, the reason may increasingly lie outside Bitcoin itself: some of the infrastructure that once waited for the next mining recovery is now being paid to remain committed elsewhere.
