Bitcoin miners shift to AI as selling pressure plunges

Selling pressure from bitcoin mining companies appears to have weakened sharply. Analysts see it as a change that has emerged as the mining industry shifts power and data-centre resources to AI and high-performance computing (HPC) businesses.

On Sept. 7 (local time), U.Today reported that listed bitcoin miners’ actual active hashrate fell by about 56 EH/s in the first half of this year, down 15 percent. Over the same period, the decline in the overall bitcoin network hashrate was about 10 percent. The industry views it as reflecting not only worsening mining profitability but also the impact of shifting power and data centres to AI and HPC businesses.

The scale of related investment is also large. TheEnergyMag estimated capital spending by listed miners and AI infrastructure-related companies at about $30 billion, or about 40.2 trillion won, in an earlier analysis. The 14 companies used for a recent comparison spent $18.6 billion, or about 24.9 trillion won, in a single quarter, and total capital spending by the main 6 companies generating HPC revenue amounted to about 15 times their revenue over that period.

Alongside the large-scale investment, bitcoin flowed actively out of miners’ wallets during the summer. In August, when bitcoin prices rose, CryptoQuant’s Miner Position Index (MPI) at one point jumped to 2.8. A higher MPI means miners’ coin outflows are above average, and it is used as a signal of potentially rising selling pressure.