The bitcoin miners AI pivot now has dates. Two of the largest US-listed miners have said when they expect to be out of the business. In a quarterly report filed with the SEC on Thursday 5 November, IREN said it aims to “substantially complete” its move from bitcoin blockchain and earns a reward, which makes rewriting history very expensive.">mining to AI cloud services by 31 December 2026, with only “immaterial” mining left through 2027. Core Scientific’s 10-Q, filed the same day, says its hosted mining ends by 31 December. Its chief financial officer went further on the earnings call: according to Cointelegraph’s account of the call, he expects the company’s own mining to be wound down within the fourth quarter. TeraWulf, which reported on Friday 6 November, has announced no exit, but bitcoin now brings in about 17% of its revenue, according to The Block.
The shift to AI hosting has been under way for more than a year. This week the dates went into writing, and the third-quarter figures show how little mining these companies still do. IREN mined 402 bitcoin in the three months to 30 September, against 2,039 a year earlier. Its mining revenue fell to $28 million from $233 million.
Bitcoin itself barely noticed. The network ran at about 1,040.7 EH/s (exahashes per second) at 14:18 UTC on Friday, according to mempool.space, and mining difficulty sits at a record 148.36T. Bitcoin traded near $75,540 at 14:13 UTC, down 4.98% over 24 hours. The miners’ shares fell with AI stocks on Thursday, not with bitcoin.
IREN: from 45.3 EH/s to 8.8 EH/s in a year
IREN’s fiscal first quarter of 2027 ended on 30 September. In its 10-Q, the company says it had about 7.9 EH/s of installed bitcoin mining capacity at that date, using about 180 MW of data-centre capacity, while its AI cloud business ran on about 93 MW. It sells the bitcoin it mines every day and held none on 30 September.
The sentence that matters is short. “We aim to substantially complete this transition by December 31, 2026 with immaterial Bitcoin mining operations expected to continue through calendar year 2027,” the filing says. That is not the same as switching every machine off on New Year’s Eve. Some mining will keep running next year; the company just expects it to be too small to matter in its accounts.
Average operating hashrate during the quarter was 8.8 EH/s, against 45.3 EH/s a year earlier, the filing says. Mining revenue was $28 million. The 10-Q splits the $205 million fall: $116 million came from mining fewer bitcoin, $89 million from a lower average bitcoin price. The Block added that mining revenue was down 58% from $67 million in the previous quarter.
AI cloud revenue reached $200 million, of which $135 million from cloud services and $65 million from leases. That is up 182% on the quarter, The Block said, with Nvidia, Microsoft and 13 other customers under contract. Total revenue was $228 million, against $240 million a year earlier. A year ago almost all of that came from mining. Now about one dollar in eight does.
The cost side moved the same way. Mining cost of revenue fell to $18 million from $80 million, which the filing puts down to a $61 million drop in electricity costs as hardware was decommissioned. IREN still booked a net loss of $263 million, against net income of $385 million a year earlier, while adjusted EBITDA rose to $66 million from $19 million, according to The Block. MLQ reported that IREN’s revenue backlog rose 22% to $20.3 billion and that its target of more than $4 billion in annualised recurring revenue slipped from year-end to January, possibly the end of February, after a customer asked for a design change.
None of this surprises anyone who followed the company. IREN said in March 2025 that it would stop expanding its mining fleet. When it reported its fiscal fourth quarter at the end of August, it already expected mining to be “effectively decommissioned by the end of December 2026”, CoinGeek reported on 4 September. The plan is old. This is the first quarter in which it shows in the revenue line.
Core Scientific: hosted mining ends on 31 December, self-mining in the fourth quarter
Core Scientific now earns most of its money as a landlord for AI computing. Its third-quarter release shows colocation revenue of $215.4 million, up nearly 60% from $136.7 million in the second quarter, with billing for 485 MW against 395 MW three months earlier. Total revenue was $232.9 million, against $164.2 million in the second quarter and $81.1 million a year earlier.
Mining shrank on every line. Self-mining revenue was $12.3 million, down from $21.5 million in the second quarter and $57.4 million a year earlier. Hosted mining, where Core runs machines owned by a client, brought in $5.2 million. Together that is about 7.5% of revenue. Self-mining cost $19.8 million to run, so Core lost $7.5 million on it before overheads, a gross margin of minus 61%. Power alone cost $10.5 million.
The 10-Q is precise about what has a date and what does not. “Our hosted mining operations are expected to conclude by December 31, 2026, while we continue to wind down our self-mining operations,” it says. The company still runs a self-mining fleet at two facilities and has one hosted mining customer left. It says it is “not investing in new mining equipment” and is focused on getting cash out of the machines it has. Over nine months it raised $286.8 million by selling bitcoin it had mined.
The fourth-quarter date for self-mining does not come from the filing but from the earnings call on 5 November, and we have not heard or read the call ourselves. Cointelegraph reported, as relayed by MLQ, that chief financial officer Jim Nygaard said the company expects to finish the wind-down in the fourth quarter and enter 2027 as a colocation business only. According to the same second-hand account, Nygaard said Core had nearly 50% fewer miners online at the end of September than at the end of 2025.
Core’s exit has come in steps. In December 2025 the Wall Street Journal reported a mining exit targeted for 2028, MLQ recalled. Core booked a $266.5 million impairment on mining equipment and infrastructure in the first quarter of 2026, and in the second quarter it took a $41.9 million loss to end a mining equipment contract with Block and Proto. On 28 July it announced a deal with AMD that could support up to 2.5 GW of leasable capacity. Its headline net income of $1.18 billion for the quarter comes mainly from a non-cash change in the fair value of warrants, the release says, and tells little about the business.
TeraWulf keeps mining, but it is now 17% of revenue
TeraWulf is the odd one of the three. It filed an 8-K on 6 November and, unlike IREN and Core, has not announced an end to mining. The figures below come from The Block’s report on its results, because the filing we opened is a short cover document with no tables.
According to The Block, bitcoin mining revenue fell to $13.2 million from $43.4 million a year earlier, a drop of about 69%. Revenue from leasing computing capacity (HPC, for high-performance computing) rose to about $63 million from $7.2 million. Total revenue was $76.2 million, and HPC made up 83% of it, against 14% a year earlier.
The Block also reported an operating loss of $88.2 million and negative adjusted EBITDA of $12.8 million. Net income attributable to shareholders was $709.9 million, but that came from a $728.4 million non-cash gain on warrant and derivative liabilities, so it says nothing about how the business performed. The Block said the company’s Kentucky campus is tied to a 20-year lease with Anthropic for about 401 MW, worth about $19 billion over its first term, with Google backing the project financing. We have not seen that in a company document.
TeraWulf shares were up 8.1% at $10.90 in pre-market trading on Friday, according to The Block’s article published at 13:40 UTC, before the 14:30 UTC open.
Three quarterly reports, one direction
The table puts the three reports side by side. Mining share is our calculation from the reported revenue lines.
| Company (quarter to 30 Sep 2026) | Mining revenue | Mining revenue a year earlier | AI / hosting revenue | Total revenue | Mining share | Stated plan for mining |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IREN | $28M | $233M | $200M (AI cloud) | $228M | about 12% | Transition substantially complete by 31 Dec 2026, immaterial mining through 2027 (10-Q) |
| Core Scientific | $17.4M (self $12.3M, hosted $5.2M) | $66.2M (self $57.4M, hosted $8.7M) | $215.4M (colocation) | $232.9M | about 7.5% | Hosted mining ends by 31 Dec 2026 (10-Q); self-mining wind-down to finish in Q4, the CFO said according to Cointelegraph |
| TeraWulf | $13.2M | $43.4M | about $63M (HPC leases) | $76.2M | about 17% | No exit announced |
IREN figures come from its 10-Q, Core figures from its release and 10-Q, TeraWulf figures from The Block.
Bitcoin miners’ AI pivot: why AI data centres pay more
CoinShares, in its report on second-quarter mining published on 15 September, estimated that AI and HPC work brings annual profits of about $1.5 million per megawatt, against $0.5 million for mining. Same land, same grid connection, three times the profit. The same report put the monthly average hashprice, a miner’s revenue per unit of computing power, at an all-time low of $27.7 per petahash per second per day in June. Keel ceased mining on 29 June.
CoinShares also estimated that the listed miners’ weighted average cash cost to produce one bitcoin, before tax, was about $75,500 in the second quarter. Bitcoin traded near $75,540 at 14:13 UTC on Friday. That is a comparison of our own, between a quarterly average and a single price, but it shows how thin the margin is for the average listed miner.
Mining revenue also depends on the block reward, which the April 2024 halving cut to 3.125 bitcoin. Fees do not make up for it. Over the last 144 blocks to height 974,813, read at 14:18 UTC, miners earned 454.18 BTC, of which 4.18 BTC, or 0.9%, came from fees, according to mempool.space. At 144 blocks a day and $75,540 per bitcoin, that works out to roughly $33 per petahash per second per day across a 1,040.7 EH/s network, by our calculation.
A miner that can sign a 15-year or 20-year lease with a cloud company gets a fixed income instead of one that moves with the bitcoin price, the difficulty and the next halving, expected in April 2028. That is the trade IREN and Core have chosen. They keep the sites and the power contracts, and replace the ASICs with GPUs or rent the halls to a tenant who brings their own.
What it changes for the bitcoin network: hashrate, difficulty and who mines instead
So far, not much. IREN’s remaining 7.9 EH/s of installed capacity on 30 September equals about 0.76% of the network’s 1,040.7 EH/s at 14:18 UTC on 6 November, by our calculation. Its average hashrate fell by about 36 EH/s in a year, roughly 3.5% of today’s network. CoinShares wrote in September that at least 35 EH/s is scheduled to leave the listed group as IREN and Cipher complete their exits; Cipher expects mining to be immaterial by 2030 and likely gone by the end of 2027.
We cannot give a combined share for the three companies. Core Scientific’s release and the parts of its 10-Q we read give no hashrate, and TeraWulf’s is not in our sources. Any figure for the three together would be a guess.
The network did dip this summer. CoinShares put the seven-day average hashrate at around 920 EH/s in mid-August. It has since come back above 1 ZH/s. Difficulty rose 5.92% to 140.58T on 16 October, as we reported at the time, then 5.54% on 29 October to a record 148.36T. Difficulty follows the hashrate of the whole network and resets every 2,016 blocks. If it keeps rising while listed miners leave, someone else is plugging in machines.
That points to the real question, which is who mines rather than how much. US-listed companies publish their fleets, costs and power sources every quarter. Private operators do not, so the newcomers are hard to name. In the last month, Foundry USA found 25.6% of blocks and AntPool 20.6%, according to mempool.space smart contract holding reserves of two or more tokens, supplied by users, that a decentralized exchange uses to execute trades automatically at a price set by a formula.">pool data read on 6 November. Pools are not companies, and their share says nothing about which firm owns the machines behind them.
No source we read says the network’s security is at risk. Proof of work depends on how much computing power is behind the chain, not on who runs it. The machines being switched off are the least profitable ones, and the network is above 1 ZH/s.
Shares fell with AI stocks, not with bitcoin
IREN fell 17% on Thursday 5 November, to close at $18.03 (the US close, 21:00 UTC), in what The Block described as a broader sell-off across AI and tech stocks. It had closed at $41.65 on Thursday 3 September (20:00 UTC), CoinGeek reported. On Friday, Bernstein gave an Outperform rating and raised its target to $55, The Block said. That is Bernstein’s view, not ours.
The Nasdaq closed 5.52% lower on Thursday and the S&P 500 4.36% lower, Fox Business reported, in a sell-off of AI and chip stocks as investors weighed what the Democrats’ midterm sweep could mean for AI regulation and data-centre construction. Our midterms preview covers the crypto side of that vote.
For shareholders, the link to bitcoin has thinned. A year ago, mining made up almost all of IREN’s revenue. IREN and Core now trade like AI landlords, and their building plans depend on investors’ appetite for AI.
They are not alone. Japan’s IORE said on 1 November it would sell all 151 of its bitcoin to fund AI data centres, as we reported.
What to watch next
- About 13 November: the next difficulty adjustment, at height 975,744. mempool.space estimated a 3.2% fall at 14:18 UTC on Friday; the estimate moves with block times.
- Fourth quarter: Core Scientific’s self-mining wind-down, which the CFO said would be finished before 2027, according to Cointelegraph.
- 31 December 2026: IREN’s target to substantially complete its transition, and the end of Core’s hosted mining.
- January to end of February 2027: IREN’s delayed target of more than $4 billion in annualised recurring revenue, according to MLQ.
- Third-quarter results from Hut 8, Cipher, CleanSpark, MARA and Riot, which will show whether the rest of the listed group follows.
TeraWulf still mines, and it has not said when, or if, that stops.