Roughly $1.5 billion of mining hardware was supposed to leave the Bitcoin network for good. A good chunk of the computing power it represented seems to have come back.
Bitcoin's seven‑day average hashrate has climbed above 1 zettahash per second (1,000 exahashes), its highest reading since March 3, according to BlocksBridge Consulting's Miner Weekly newsletter. Anyone who bet the AI pivot would thin out the field now has an awkward number to explain.
Hashrate Keeps Climbing While Big Miners Look Elsewhere
The pivot itself is real. BlocksBridge had earlier tracked a 23% drop in realized hashrate among publicly traded miners, alongside a 52% quarterly jump in their AI and high‑performance computing revenue. Rigs were switched off, or at least sidelined, so the companies that own them could chase data‑center money.
Yet the network as a whole didn't shrink. Difficulty rose 5.92% on Oct. 16, and BlocksBridge projects another 5.16% at the next adjustment. Stack the two and you get roughly 11.4%. Difficulty only goes up when blocks are being found faster than the target pace, so someone is plugging in machines.
CryptoQuant's numbers tell the same story over a longer stretch. Hashrate sat near 726 EH/s in July and was around 1,050 EH/s on Wednesday, a recovery of about 45%, per CryptoQuant data cited by Cointelegraph. It's still short of the 1,305 EH/s peak from October 2025, when Bitcoin traded above $111,000. At Thursday's US open the price was about $81,843.
Do that math. Miners are rebuilding capacity at a price roughly 27% below where the last record was set.
Smaller Operators May Be Buying the Big Miners' Castoffs
Nobody has published a clean ledger of where the returning power comes from. BlocksBridge has a theory: smaller and mid‑sized operators are buying used machines from the big names. It points to Sazmining, which lists secondhand Antminer S21 XP units that buyers can host in Paraguay or Texas. With cheap power, a used rig can beat a new one on payback. And a machine pulled from a public miner's fleet doesn't die. It just changes address.
How much of that secondhand supply started at a listed company is unknown. So is how much has actually been switched back on.
Public miners aren't all leaving, either. Nasdaq‑listed NIP Group announced a third on‑rack purchase agreement, for about 4.47 EH/s of hardware already deployed. If all three tranches close, its total reaches 13.85 EH/s. It currently operates 3.11 EH/s, which ranks 16th among public miners. Ziven's data puts Bitdeer on top of that list with 79.9 EH/s.
The stock market isn't paying for the effort. NIP Group fell 6.8% on Wednesday to $6.10, extending an 86% slide over the past year. That same session, a hotter‑than‑expected inflation print sent the broader market lower, and the pain reached miners and AI infrastructure names alike. TeraWulf, Core Scientific, Cipher Mining and IREN all gave up about 12% apiece.
A Bullish Read, With Caveats
CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju called the rising hashrate an "indirect bullish signal" on X. His reasoning: public miners lean on traditional finance backing, so more power means institutions are still willing to fund the sector. Higher hashrate does make the network harder to attack. That part is plain arithmetic.
The signal is muddier than it looks, though. If a large share of the new power belongs to small operators buying castoffs, it says more about cheap electricity and cheap hardware than about Wall Street conviction. And a 12% one‑day drop in miner shares is a strange way to show confidence.
I can't prove it from the data, but my read is that the AI pivot is moving hashrate around rather than removing it. The big, listed names get a second revenue line. The small ones get discounted rigs. The people squeezed are anyone whose margins depend on difficulty holding still.
The next adjustment will show whether the projected 5.16% bump arrives on schedule. I'd watch that figure first, then whether hashrate pushes toward last October's 1,305 EH/s while the price stays well beneath $111,000. If it does, margins get thinner for everyone, and the hardware auction gets busier.
