Miners are leaving bitcoin: Core Scientific and IREN exit by year-end

Three public mining companies showed within two days that bitcoin production is no longer their main business. Core Scientific plans to leave mining completely by the end of 2026, IREN intends to do the same, and TeraWulf's mining revenue fell 69% in a quarter. This matters for the market because public miners shaped a noticeable share of new coin supply for years, and that share is now shrinking.

What the reports actually showed

Core Scientific was the first to name a firm date. Chief financial officer Jim Nygaard told investors on the earnings call that the company will finish winding down mining in the fourth quarter and enter 2027 as a provider of space for high-density servers. Colocation, meaning rented space, power and cooling for other people's hardware, already brings most of the revenue, $215.4 million of $232.9 million for the quarter. Bitcoin mining added only $17.5 million, or 7.5%.

Core Scientific's own mining revenue fell from $57.4 million to $12.3 million in a year, and hosting for other miners shrank from $8.7 million to $5.2 million. By the end of September almost half as many machines were online as at the end of 2025.

IREN arrived at nearly the same place. Mining revenue dropped 58%, the company wants to exit it fully by year-end, and its cloud business for AI grew 182% to $200 million for the quarter. At TeraWulf, revenue from leasing capacity for high-performance computing rose 774% to $63 million, while bitcoin mining brought in 69% less than a year ago.

Why servers beat mining

The reason is economics. In the first quarter Core Scientific wrote off $266.5 million of mining assets and named a weaker bitcoin price, historically low hashprice (a miner's revenue per unit of computing power) and falling equipment prices on the secondary market. In the second quarter it also terminated a mining equipment agreement with Block and Proto and booked a $41.9 million loss.

A lease contract gives a predictable payment. Mining depends on the coin price, which now hovers around $75,700.

The turn was not sudden. Core Scientific signed its first hosting deal with CoreWeave in March 2024 and a larger one in June of that year, and at the time it presented AI as an expansion next to mining. In December 2025 the Wall Street Journal reported that the company already planned to wind down mining by 2028. That deadline has now moved closer by almost two years.

TeraWulf is the clearest example. Its $19 billion deal with Anthropic includes an unusual clause. If Anthropic stops paying rent, Google can take a stake in the project. So even the customer's risk is already built into the structure of the deal.

How the market reacted

VanEck analysts say miners are oversold after a 35% drop in October. In their view investors dumped all companies tied to AI infrastructure as one trade, even though the businesses are very different. Part of the selloff can therefore be explained by general fear of the AI market, not by the state of mining.

American Bitcoin, the company linked to Eric Trump, showed a different picture. Third-quarter net income was $126 million against a $57.2 million loss in the second quarter, but almost all of it came from revaluing Bitcoin on the balance sheet. Revenue fell to $63.4 million and missed analyst forecasts because production declined and summer electricity prices pushed costs up.

What does this mean for the price? Miners traditionally sell part of the coins they produce to pay for electricity, which means they sell bitcoin for dollars every day. Companies that wind down production stop receiving new coins and, accordingly, stop selling them. The reports themselves contain no data on how sales volumes changed, so it is too early to talk about pressure easing on the price.

Risks for those who stay

The exit of big players does not make life easier for everyone else. There are several problems at once.

• Hashprice, as Core Scientific describes it, sits at a historic low, so miners' margins are thin.
• Electricity has become expensive enough that American Bitcoin's revenue fell short of expectations.
• Some of the capacity that the public sector leaves may pass to private companies, and the reports have no data on the change in total hashrate.
• Political resistance to large data centers is growing: according to Reuters, opponents of such facilities, who complain about electricity bills, were among the winners of the US midterms.

The last point also touches the AI projects themselves. If data centers start getting fewer permits, companies that bet everything on them will end up in the same kind of dependence they were running from.

Bottom line for the bitcoin market

Public miners are turning into infrastructure for AI. For bitcoin this means that one of the old sources of supply, the sale of mined coins, is gradually narrowing, while the price depends more on ETF demand and large buyers. At Kurslog we look at this shift through a question, whether the supply of BTC on the market change. So far there is no answer in the numbers.