Bitcoin’s 316-Day Hashrate Drought Deepens as AI Lures Miners

Bitcoin's network hashrate has spent 316 consecutive days below its all-time high, the longest such stretch in over a decade, even as BTC rallied 34.9% from late June to above $81,000 by late August. The seven-day average sat near 914 exahashes per second on Aug 31, about 20.6% below the October 2025 peak of 1,151.6 EH/s, while mining difficulty was 18.3% off its November 2025 high, the largest drawdown since China's 2021 mining ban. Hashprice recovered to $39.36 per petahash per second per day, above the 30-day average of $34.63, yet the network is still running roughly 237 EH/s below where it stood ten months ago.

Why it matters

The usual recovery loop is no longer firing on the same inputs. Historically a 35% Bitcoin rally, paired with falling difficulty, pulls idle machines back online. The operators powering down in this cycle are not sitting on idle fleets. They are converting the same power and data-center footprint into AI and high-performance computing capacity on contracts measured in decades.

IREN cut installed self-mining from 50 EH/s in June 2025 to 23.2 EH/s by June 2026, redirecting infrastructure to AI Cloud Services, with about 40 MW of AI capacity already operating at the end of June. TeraWulf reported 102 MW of critical-IT capacity energized in July alongside 145 MW of legacy Bitcoin mining. Riot Platforms signed a roughly $9 billion, 20-year compute agreement with Anthropic in August, even as it raised deployed mining capacity to 44.4 EH/s. Power tied to a long-dated compute customer does not return to mining on a 10% difficulty adjustment.

Market impact

Bitcoin's self-correcting mechanism is still working. The Aug 8 difficulty adjustment rose 1% for the first time in the series VanEck tracked, and by Aug 31 the seven-day hashrate had climbed to 915 EH/s, up 3.3% week-over-week, with blocks arriving every 9 minutes 56 seconds, near the 10-minute target.

The structural question is whether improving economics can pull enough hashpower back to end the drought. The Puell Multiple averaged 0.73 over the prior 30 days, in the 16th percentile, signaling unusually weak miner revenue.