A guide to bitcoin mining economics as hashrate passes 1 ZH/s and miners chase AI
Record hashrate, rising difficulty and near-zero fee income are reshaping who mines bitcoin. Here is how hashprice works and why listed miners are turning to AI.
BITCOINMININGANALYSIS
Daniel Hartley
10/28/20263 min read
Bitcoin's network has never had more computing power behind it. In mid-October, the seven-day average hashrate climbed above 1 zettahash per second, or 1,000 exahashes, its highest level since early March, according to data cited by ForkLog. Yet the companies that once defined the industry are steering more of their capital toward artificial intelligence. Both trends are true at the same time, and understanding why requires a short tour of how mining revenue actually works in 2026.
Hashrate, difficulty and hashprice
Hashrate is the combined computing power miners point at the network. Difficulty is the protocol's response to it: roughly every two weeks, the network adjusts how hard it is to find a block so that blocks keep arriving about every ten minutes. On October 16, difficulty rose 5.92% to 140.58 trillion, and mining data firm BlocksBridge expected another increase of around 5% at the following adjustment.
For a miner, the number that matters most is hashprice: expected revenue per unit of computing power per day, usually quoted in dollars per petahash. It combines four variables, namely the bitcoin price, the block subsidy, transaction fees and difficulty. When the price rises and difficulty lags, hashprice improves. When difficulty catches up, the gain erodes. That is exactly the pattern of 2026. Calculations published by hosting provider OneMiners put hashprice near $28 per petahash per day in July, when bitcoin traded around $60,000. By September 30, with bitcoin near $83,000, it had recovered to about $40. Since then, the price has drifted lower while difficulty has climbed, which squeezes margins again.
Why fees no longer help
Since the April 2024 halving, each block pays a subsidy of 3.125 BTC. Transaction fees were supposed to gradually make up for shrinking subsidies, but in 2026 they have done little of that work. At the end of September, OneMiners estimated fees at under 1% of the block subsidy, based on mempool.space data. In practice, miner income is almost entirely a bet on the bitcoin price, and the next halving, expected in 2028, will cut the subsidy in half again.
Hardware efficiency is the other lever. Measured in joules per terahash, newer machines use far less electricity per unit of work. At a hashprice of about $40, OneMiners calculated that a current-generation hydro-cooled Antminer rated at 9.5 J/TH breaks even at electricity costs of around 17 cents per kilowatt-hour, while an older S19k Pro at 23 J/TH needs power below about 7 cents. That spread explains why older fleets are the first to be switched off, sold or relocated whenever hashprice dips.
The AI pivot, explained
Large listed miners own something AI companies badly want: grid connections, permitted land and experience running dense, power-hungry facilities. Renting that capacity to cloud and AI customers brings contracted, dollar-denominated revenue instead of a volatile income stream tied to bitcoin. Analysts cited by ForkLog found that public miners' realized hashrate fell about 15% in the first half of 2026, while their AI and high-performance computing revenue rose 52% between the first and second quarters. IREN's plan for a 300-megawatt AI cloud campus in Spain is the latest example of that shift.
The network did not shrink as a result. Machines retired by listed companies are increasingly bought by smaller operators with access to cheap electricity, and some miners keep expanding aggressively. Bitdeer, for example, reported its own hashrate at 82.3 EH/s in September, up from 35 EH/s a year earlier. Hashrate is becoming more dispersed across companies and regions, a trend that advocates of decentralization tend to welcome.
What to watch
Three indicators will show how this plays out. The first is hashprice relative to the cost of running mid-generation machines; a sustained move below the $30 area would likely force another wave of shutdowns. The second is the next few difficulty adjustments: if they keep rising while the price stalls, margins compress further. The third is the share of listed miners' revenue coming from AI hosting, which reveals how much of the sector's capital remains committed to securing bitcoin at all.
Another development worth tracking is the open-source mining hardware initiative backed by Tether and a group of manufacturers that includes Bitmain and Canaan. Cheaper, more modular hardware could lower barriers for small miners and shift the balance further away from a handful of listed giants.
For now, the paradox resolves neatly. Bitcoin's security budget is at a record in computing terms, but the people providing it are changing. The typical miner of 2026 is less often a Nasdaq-listed company and more often a smaller operator chasing the cheapest kilowatt-hour it can find. For holders, that is not a warning sign. It is the market doing what it was designed to do: moving production to wherever it is cheapest, while the protocol keeps issuing blocks every ten minutes regardless of who runs the machines.