Bitcoin miners are abandoning their ASIC fleets. This month, Core Scientific, Riot, IREN, Cipher, CleanSpark, Hut 8, and TeraWulf all announced they're decommissioning mining rigs and installing GPU-based systems to run AI and large language models. The pivot comes as hashprice — the dollar value of 1 PH/day of hashrate — hit an all-time low of $28.90 in early 2026, and Bitcoin's own price dropped 21% in a single day in February, falling from $76,000 to $60,000.
The hashprice crunch
Mining has been brutal. Between November 12, 2025 and February 7, 2026, Bitcoin's difficulty adjusted downward six times out of seven adjustments. The only positive bump was a microscopic 0.04% on Christmas Eve. That's rare — and it tells you how many machines have been unplugged. Transaction fees are basically zero right now; you can get a confirmation for under 1 sat/vbyte. Ordinals and inscriptions, which briefly juiced fee revenue in 2023, are dead. No Layer 2 has stepped in to fill the void either.
The GPU pivot
So the big mining firms are repurposing their facilities. They're pulling out ASICs — the single-purpose chips that only mine Bitcoin — and racking up NVIDIA GPUs that can handle AI inference workloads. The shift isn't subtle. Core Scientific, for instance, has been public about co-locating AI clients alongside its Bitcoin mining. Riot and CleanSpark are building out GPU clusters. It's a bet that AI demand from LLM companies will pay better than the dwindling block subsidy.
Epstein files add heat
Meanwhile, the second batch of Epstein files dropped on January 31, 2026. The documents reportedly implicate early Bitcoiners and some of the first Bitcoin companies. The timing isn't great for an industry trying to pitch itself as legitimate to institutional investors and AI hyperscalers. No specific names from the facts, but the association lingers.
The math of 2036
There's a longer-term question no one's answered yet. By 2036 the block subsidy will fall to 0.78125 BTC — one quarter of today's 3.125 BTC. To match today's nominal payout of 3.125 BTC at $212,000, Bitcoin would need to be $272,000. That's a tall order. For now, the miners are chasing the AI dollar. Whether that covers the hole left by dying Ordinals and near-zero fees is the open question.
