IREN, TeraWulf, Hut 8: Why Bitcoin Mining Companies Are Booming in 2026

Listed Bitcoin mining companies own the one thing AI cannot build fast enough: grid power. That same lesson decides who does well in mining itself.

By Michal Beno, CEO, OneMiners16 October 2026

A Bitcoin mining company runs thousands of Bitcoin miners, specialised computers that compete to add new blocks to the Bitcoin blockchain. Each block currently pays 3.125 BTC to the winner, plus transaction fees. With about 144 blocks a day, roughly 450 new bitcoin are shared across the whole network daily, split by how much computing power, called hashrate, each miner contributes.

Revenue depends on bitcoin's price and on the network's total hashrate, now about 970 EH/s. Costs are mostly electricity. To compete, mining companies spent years securing cheap power contracts, grid connections, cooling and land, often in places like Texas, upstate New York and Canada. That infrastructure is exactly what AI developers now want. Google searches for IREN are up about 233% year over year and for TeraWulf about 311%, according to Rising Trends data from October 2026.

The easiest way to understand the shift is to think like a landlord who owns electricity. A company with 1 MW (one megawatt, or 1,000 kW) of connected power can fill it with Bitcoin miners or rent it to an AI customer. Whichever earns more per megawatt, for longer and with less risk, wins.

For mining, the arithmetic uses efficiency, measured in J/TH (joules per terahash, the energy a miner needs per unit of work). Lower is better: the same megawatt powers more hashrate.

Electricity for that megawatt costs about $0.42M a year at $0.048 per kWh, so a 15 J/TH fleet keeps roughly $0.55M before staff, sites and hardware wear. Now compare simple per-megawatt figures from three AI leases: divide the headline contract value by its years and by its megawatts.

The numbers are rough, but the picture is clear: an AI lease can beat older mining fleets per megawatt, fixed for a decade or more. Mining on the newest hardware stays competitive, but its revenue moves with hashprice every day.

Some miners lease buildings and power to AI firms, a model called colocation or hosting. Others buy graphics processors (GPUs) and rent computing time directly as an AI cloud. Either way, revenue is fixed in long contracts, very different from daily mining income.

IREN, formerly Iris Energy, announced on 3 November 2025 a five-year, roughly $9.7 billion GPU cloud contract with Microsoft, served from its 750 MW Childress campus in Texas, and agreed to buy about $5.8 billion of GPUs and equipment from Dell to deliver it. On 7 May 2026 it added a five-year, roughly $3.4 billion AI cloud contract with Nvidia, with services due to start in early 2027.

TeraWulf signed 10-year leases in August 2025 with AI cloud provider Fluidstack at its Lake Mariner campus in New York, with Google backstopping about $3.2 billion of Fluidstack's obligations, according to company filings. In August 2026 it reported a 20-year lease with Anthropic for about 401 MW in Kentucky, worth about $19 billion, and said computing leases made up 71% of its second-quarter revenue (The Block, 5 August 2026).

Cipher Mining signed a 10-year, 168 MW hosting deal with Fluidstack on 25 September 2025, worth about $3 billion with a $1.4 billion Google backstop, then a 15-year, roughly $5.5 billion lease with Amazon Web Services for 300 MW, announced in November 2025. Hut 8 signed a 15-year, $7 billion lease with Fluidstack in December 2025 to deliver AI capacity for Anthropic at its River Bend campus in Louisiana, also with Google support, and placed its Bitcoin mining in American Bitcoin, which listed on Nasdaq in September 2025.

AI models take enormous amounts of electricity. Chips can be ordered and buildings put up, but a new data centre can wait years for a grid connection, permits and substation upgrades. A mining site with 100 MW or more of approved power can be converted far sooner. In plain terms, miners own a shortcut.

Several regions have started rationing power for big new users. Texas now requires loads of 75 MW or more to meet new connection standards under Senate Bill 6 from June 2025, and British Columbia moved in October 2025 to permanently block new crypto mining connections. That makes an existing, energised site valuable twice: it can mine Bitcoin today and be leased to an AI tenant tomorrow.

Hashprice is the revenue a miner earns per unit of computing power per day. It falls when bitcoin's price drops or when more competitors join the network. According to a CoinShares report covered by The Block in March 2026, hashprice fell to about $36 to $38 per PH/s per day in the fourth quarter of 2025 and to about $28 to $30 in the first quarter of 2026, a record low, while listed miners' average cash cost to produce one bitcoin rose to about $79,995.

The squeeze has a built-in cause. Every four years the network halves the reward per block. The April 2024 halving cut it from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC, and the next is expected around spring 2028, at roughly block 1,050,000, about 79,962 blocks from today. Each halving removes half of the new-coin revenue overnight, so miners with expensive power or older hardware are pushed out unless bitcoin's price rises enough to compensate.

With margins that thin, steady AI rent looked far more attractive. CoinShares estimated that listed miners could earn as much as 70% of revenue from AI by the end of 2026, up from about 30%, and counted more than $70 billion in AI and computing contracts by March 2026. Hashprice has since recovered to about $40 per PH/s per day at today's numbers, but the shift is locked in by long contracts.

The listed companies teach a clear lesson: power cost and efficiency decide who gets through a low hashprice. An individual can apply the same rules without building a data centre. The table shows the highest electricity price each Bitcoin miner can pay before power alone eats its revenue.

Efficiency sets how much power a miner can afford

Bitcoin miner	Efficiency	Break-even power
Antminer S23 Hyd 3U 1160T	9.5 J/TH	$0.175 per kWh
Antminer S21 XP Hyd 473T	12.0 J/TH	$0.138 per kWh
Antminer S21 Pro 245T	15.0 J/TH	$0.111 per kWh
Antminer S21 200T	17.6 J/TH	$0.094 per kWh

Break-even = hashprice / (24 x J/TH / 1,000), at $0.0398 per TH/s per day on 5 October 2026. Power only; hardware and fees not included.

Antminer S23 Hyd 3U 1160T$28,399Hashrate1,160 TH/sEfficiency9.50 J/THPower draw11,020 WBreak-even power$0.175/kWhNet/day at 4.80c$33.47View on OneMiners

Antminer S23 Hyd 580T$12,299Hashrate580 TH/sEfficiency9.50 J/THPower draw5,510 WBreak-even power$0.175/kWhNet/day at 4.80c$16.74View on OneMiners

Antminer S21 XP Hyd 473T$6,199Hashrate473 TH/sEfficiency12.00 J/THPower draw5,676 WBreak-even power$0.138/kWhNet/day at 4.80c$12.29View on OneMiners

Live OneMiners store prices, 6 October 2026. Daily figures are at today's numbers and change with Bitcoin's price and network difficulty. No return is promised.

As listed miners move capacity to AI, some hashrate may leave the network, which can ease competition for those who keep mining. Nobody can promise that, but efficient hardware on cheap, reliable power is the strongest position either way.

Frequently asked questions

Michal Beno

CEO of OneMiners, the global Bitcoin mining hosting and hardware platform with 15 published hosting locations, 7-year fixed electricity contracts and a 7-year hardware warranty. He writes about the economics of industrial Bitcoin mining.

Informational only, not financial advice. Figures are a snapshot from public market data and news reports as of 5 October 2026 and can change quickly. Crypto prices can fall as well as rise. No return is offered or implied. Do your own research.