After miners sign AI hosting contracts, can the remaining power still be used to expand hashrate? This question is actually backwards. The real situation is: miners are not expanding hashrate because they have "leftover power." Instead, they are directly reassigning the power originally used for mining to AI customers.
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"Remaining power" is an illusion
In the past, miners stockpiled power based on the logic of "lock in power first, install machines later." Mining requires stable, low-cost electricity. Miners secured their place on the grid and built substations before mining machines arrived. But after shifting to AI, this entire logic has flipped.
The clearest example is Core Scientific. In the second quarter of 2026, its high-density hosting revenue reached $136.7 million, accounting for 83% of total revenue. Self-mining revenue dropped from $62.42 million to $21.54 million, with a gross margin of -56%. Using the same assets and the same power capacity, renting to AI clients produced a positive gross margin of 59%, while keeping it for self-mining resulted in losses. Once you do the math, you will not ask "can the remaining power still be used for mining?" Instead, you will ask "how much power can be freed up to lease to AI?"
Where the power goes: from "installed capacity" to "lease agreements"
Miners are not "keeping part for mining and signing part for AI." They are prioritizing usable power capacity for AI clients, while mining operations shrink.
Within six months, the combined actual hashrate of listed miners fell from 368.3 EH/s to 319.0 EH/s, a decline of 13.4%. During the same period, this group signed cumulative AI/HPC contracts worth more than $70 billion. TeraWulf signed leases covering about 401 MW and worth $19 billion. Hut 8 signed contracts for 352 MW and $9.8 billion. Riot Platforms just signed a 20-year, $9.1 billion deal with Anthropic involving 191 MW of power.
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What about "expanding hashrate"?
It still exists, but it is splitting into two camps.
MARA, Riot (part of its capacity), and American Bitcoin are still expanding mining hashrate. On the other side, Core Scientific, IREN, Cipher, TeraWulf, and Keel Infrastructure are clearly reducing mining capacity and shifting to AI hosting.
On the AI side, what is expanding is "megawatt-level computing infrastructure," not "EH/s-level mining hashrate." IREN has already signed a five-year, $3.4 billion AI cloud contract with Nvidia, entering GPU cloud services. Its "hashrate expansion" direction no longer has anything to do with Bitcoin mining.
Risk warning: the transition is not free. CoinShares estimates that mining infrastructure costs about $700,000 to $1 million per megawatt, while AI-grade liquid-cooled facilities require $8 million to $15 million per megawatt. Core Scientific's second-quarter capital expenditure reached $797.5 million, and long-term debt has exceeded $4.3 billion. Whether these contracts can be fulfilled and delivered on time is the real risk, not "whether there is spare power for mining."
How you can verify this: Open a miner's financial report or quarterly operations update and look at two numbers — "contracted customer power capacity" and "billed capacity that has started generating revenue." The gap between the two shows the real progress of the transition. If the gap is narrowing, it means power is moving from "mining" to "AI revenue." If the gap is widening, it means many contracts have been signed but not yet actually delivered — that kind of hashrate expansion is only on paper.
