Bitcoin’s 316-day hashrate drought shows why AI could make this mining downturn harder to reverse

Bitcoin’s hashrate has spent 316 days below its record as miners redirect power toward AI.

The seven-day network average stood near 914 exahashes per second on Aug. 31, about 20.6% below its October 2025 peak of 1,151.6 EH/s. The stretch without a new high is the longest in a decade, exceeding the previous 252-day maximum in the same Blockchain.com series.

The decline followed months of weak mining economics, summer power curtailments and a growing shift by some operators toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Twenty One Capital CEO Raphael Zagury has described the episode as Bitcoin’s first sustained “economic hashrate bear market.”

That description has become more significant because Bitcoin itself has already delivered the kind of price recovery that historically helped revive mining.

BTC rallied 34.9% from late June through late August reaching as high as above $81,000, while network hashrate fell 10.1% over the same period, only the second such divergence since 2012.

Higher Bitcoin prices increase the dollar value of block rewards and normally encourage miners to restart machines that became uneconomic during a downturn. This time, the response has been much weaker.