Lekker Capital CIO Quinn Thompson argues with X that the downturn in the mining economy, combined with the growing shift of public miners to AI and supercomputers, could turn the fortunes of the BTC business into a new source of market supply.
“The biggest storm that can be attributed to Bitcoin is the disaster that is the economics of mining. The only way this heals is the drop in hashrate, led by AI compute first movers like CORZ, WULF, CIFR, IREN, etc.,” writes Thompson.
The chart Thompson shared puts the problem in visual form. It shows the combined bitcoin holdings of all major listed miners increasing significantly in 2024 and 2025 before moving to 2026. Thompson’s argument is not that the AI pivot is bearish in structural terms.
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Conversely, a lower hashrate and less economic competition can improve the health of the mining industry in the long run. His point is that the revolution itself is expensive, and that capex-heavy AI buildouts may force miners to liquidate BTC that was once considered a strategic treasury.
“While useful for the long-term health and sustainability of the network economy, it presents a pricing problem in the near term as Bitcoin miners hold around 80,000 Bitcoin on their balance sheets. As these companies leave BTC mining, 1) they need money to fund AI buildout capex needs and 2) they have no reason to hold any BTC (not that they should have a balance sheet)
Bitcoin Miners Pivot To AI
The 2025 filing and public data make that argument very clear. Core Scientific’s fourth-quarter results showed the business mix shifting away from mining and toward AI-related infrastructure: mining revenue fell to $42.2 million from $79.9 million last year, while integration revenue increased to $31.3 million from $8.5 million. Management said the decline in mine handling reflected a “continuing strategic shift” to more populated areas. In the full year of 2025, Core generated $402.5 million in revenue from selling digital assets and ended the year with 2,537 BTC on its balance sheet.
TeraWulf offers even cleaner reading. The company said that by 2025 it had “reinforced HPC hosting as its primary growth engine,” signed more than $12.8 billion in long-term customer contracts, and built a platform with 522 megawatts of critical IT under contract. Yet the legacy mining business was still monetized as that building began to grow: fourth-quarter digital asset revenue was $26.1 million, compared to $9.7 million in HPC lease revenue, and year-end digital asset transfers show 1,496 BTC mined, 1,500 BTC balance dumped, and 2.01 BTC balance 2 only 2.01 BTC 2.
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Cipher and IREN show two other versions of the same trend. Cipher said it increased its focus on HPC by 2025 and signed two HPC tenants with a combined 600 MW of data center capacity. It also sold about $214.7 million worth of bitcoin during the year. By the end of the year, Cipher had classified $94.9 million of Black Pearl mining metal as held for sale after signing a sublease to convert the site to an HPC tenant. IREN, on the other hand, has already largely taken the treasury issue off the table: with approximately 99,900 GPUs installed or on order as of December 31, 2025, it said it is “usually finished.[s] every Bitcoin in the mine every day” so it held no bitcoin on its balance sheet at the end of the year.
MARA is important for a different reason. It is not yet as far as Core, TeraWulf, Cipher or IREN in turning mining sites into a full AI/HPC enterprise, although it had released its first ten AI racks in Granbury in November 2025 and later announced Starwood’s AI and HPC infrastructure partnership. But MARA is the treasury heavyweight in the group, and its disclosure of 2025 moved to Thompson’s understanding: the company said that it started selling bitcoin in the second half of 2025, sold about 4,076 BTC for $ 413.1 million during the year, and ended in 2025 with about 53,822 BTC.
That is the tension in Thompson’s thesis. A miner-led shift to AI can reduce hashrate pressure and improve the long-term economics of bitcoin mining. But the bridge from mining to AI has a lot of potential, and the 2025 documents show that the bridge is already being financed by the sale of BTC, the shedding of miners and the conversion of the site. For bitcoin, that means an industry correction that may have been building up over time may now appear to be over.
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $72,322.
The featured image was created with DALL.E, a chart from TradingView.com
