Lekker Capital CIO Quinn Thompson argues on
“A major underappreciated headwind for Bitcoin is the disaster that is the mining economy. The only way this heals is through a drop in hashrate, which is led by the AI computer first movers like CORZ, WULF, CIFR, IREN, etc.” wrote.
The diagram Thompson shared provides a visual representation of the problem. This shows that the total bitcoin holdings of major publicly traded miners will rise sharply in 2024 and 2025, before rolling over in 2026. Thompson’s argument is not that the AI pivot is bearish in structural terms.
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On the contrary, lower hashrate and less uneconomic competition could improve the health of the mining industry over time. His point is that the transition itself is expensive, and AI expansions with a high capital investment could force miners to liquidate BTC previously treated as a strategic treasury.
“While it is helpful for the long-term health and sustainability of the network economy, it poses a short-term price dilemma as Bitcoin miners have nearly 80,000 Bitcoin on their balance sheets. As these companies turn away from BTC mining, they 1) need capital to fund the capital requirements for the AI expansion and 2) they have no incentive to keep BTC on their balance sheets (not that they should have done so before),” he argued.
Bitcoin miners focus on AI
The 2025 files and public data make that argument more concrete. Core Scientific’s fourth-quarter results showed its business mix turning away from mining towards AI-related infrastructure: self-mining revenues fell to $42.2 million from $79.9 million a year earlier, while colocation revenues rose from $8.5 million to $31.3 million. Management said the decline in hosted mining reflected its “continuing strategic shift” towards high-density colocation. For the full year 2025, Core generated $402.5 million in revenue from digital asset sales and ended the year with 2,537 BTC on its balance sheet.
TeraWulf offers an even cleaner read-through. The company said that by 2025 it has “bolstered HPC hosting as a key growth driver,” signed more than $12.8 billion in long-term customer contracts and built a platform with 522 critical IT megawatts under contract. Yet the legacy mining business continued to make money as that buildout took shape: Q4 digital asset revenue was $26.1 million, versus $9.7 million in HPC lease revenue, and the year-end digital asset rollforward shows 1,496 BTC mined, 1,500 BTC divested, and just 3 BTC on the balance sheet as of December 31, 2025 stood.
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Cipher and IREN show two other versions of the same trend. Cipher said it has increased its focus on HPC in 2025 and signed two HPC tenants for a combined data center capacity of 600 MW. It also sold bitcoin for about $214.7 million during the year. By year’s end, Cipher had classified $94.9 million worth of Black Pearl mining assets as held for sale after signing a sublease to transfer the site to an HPC tenant. IREN, on the other hand, has already largely taken the government bond issuance off the table: with about 99,900 GPUs installed or on order as of December 31, 2025, the company said it is “generally a liquidation.”[s] all the Bitcoin we mine every day” and therefore had no Bitcoin on the balance sheet at the end of the year.
MARA is important for another reason. It is not yet as far along as Core, TeraWulf, Cipher or IREN in converting mining sites into a full-fledged AI/HPC company, although it had deployed its first ten AI racks in Granbury in November 2025 and later announced a Starwood partnership for AI and HPC infrastructure. But MARA is the treasury heavyweight within the group, and its own 2025 revelations went Thompson’s way: the company said it started selling Bitcoin in the second half of 2025, sold about 4,076 BTC for $413.1 million over the course of the year, and still ended 2025 with about 53,822 BTC.
That is the tension in Thompson’s position. A miner-led shift to AI could reduce hashrate pressure and improve the long-term economics of bitcoin mining. But the bridge from mining to AI is capital intensive, and the 2025 documents show that the bridge is already funded by BTC sales, miner sales, and site conversions. For Bitcoin, this means that an industry adjustment that could be constructive later could still look like an overhang now.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading at $72,322.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
Credit : www.newsbtc.com
