Bitcoin News Today: Miners Caught in ETF Shift: Betting on AI to Survive Bitcoin's Fee-Free Future

As capital continues to flow into Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and custodian services, the pressure on miners has intensified, with the stagnation of onchain demand for Bitcoin exacerbating their struggles. The growing dominance of institutional and retail investors through ETFs has shifted the economic landscape, reducing the demand for onchain transactions and, in turn, the fees that miners rely on for profitability. This trend has raised concerns about the long-term sustainability of miners' ability to support the Bitcoin network without a reliable source of transaction fees.

Public and soon-to-be-public Bitcoin miners have consolidated their share of network output, with combined production reaching 32.5% in Q2 2025, up from 21.1% in the same period the previous year. This increase, however, was not evenly distributed across the industry. A handful of firms, including Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA), Cango, and CleanSpark, significantly expanded their hashrate, compensating for the decline in output from miners shifting focus to high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) opportunities. Meanwhile, companies like Bitfarms and TeraWulf have slowed their Bitcoin mining expansion in favor of capital allocation to HPC hosting and partnerships.

In Q2, Bitdeer reported a net loss of $147.7 million, driven largely by non-cash fair value changes in its derivative liabilities. Despite this, the firm saw a 57% year-on-year increase in revenue, attributed to higher self-mining and mining rig sales. BitFuFu also experienced a drop in Q2 revenue, though it was offset by gains from Bitcoin’s price appreciation and increased mining capacity. Canaan, Hive Digital, and Bitfarms similarly reported mixed results, with varying degrees of profitability and loss, reflecting the broader industry’s struggle to balance mining costs with revenue from rising BTC prices.

The transition to HPC and AI infrastructure is accelerating. Companies like Core Scientific, now on the cusp of being acquired by CoreWeave, are reallocating portions of their data centers to support AI workloads, signaling a broader shift in the mining industry. TeraWulf, for instance, expanded its HPC hosting capacity through a partnership with Fluidstack and secured a $1.4 billion funding commitment from Google. Bitfarms, meanwhile, has pivoted to energy and compute infrastructure, exiting its Paraguay and Argentina operations and divesting used ASICs.

In summary, as ETFs and institutional custodians continue to absorb the lion’s share of Bitcoin investment demand, the miner sector remains under pressure to adapt. While some are doubling down on Bitcoin mining, others are pivoting to HPC and AI infrastructure in a bid to future-proof their operations. This divergence underscores a critical inflection point in the industry's evolution, with the sustainability of traditional mining practices increasingly called into question in the absence of robust onchain activity.

Source: [1] Miners lean on BTC price rise, manufacturing, HPC (https://coingeek.com/miners-lean-on-btc-price-rise-manufacturing-hpc/) [2] Over 32% of All Bitcoin Now Comes From Public Miners (https://theminermag.com/news/2025-08-21/miner-weekly-one-third-bitcoin)