Bitcoin mining companies are shifting their focus toward AI-related business to counter shrinking profitability, but so far that pivot hasn’t been enough to pull them out of an earnings slump. Major U.S. miners MARA Holdings and CleanSpark both posted revenue declines of more than 20% year-over-year in their most recent quarters. Behind the weak results lies a broader deterioration in the profitability of bitcoin mining itself — a business whose revenue swings heavily with bitcoin prices and mining conditions, making steady growth increasingly difficult to sustain through mining alone.

MARA Holdings reported second-quarter revenue of $174.9 million, down 27% from $238.5 million a year earlier — a figure that also came in below market expectations. The company posted a net loss of $611.3 million, a sharp reversal from a $808.2 million profit in the same period last year, translating to a loss of $1.60 per share. Roughly $343 million of that loss stemmed from mark-to-market declines in the value of its digital asset holdings, including bitcoin. Adjusted EBITDA — earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — also flipped from a $1.2 billion profit last year to a $360.9 million loss this year. During the second quarter, MARA mined 2,422 bitcoin at an average price of roughly $71,325, and sold 2,213 of those coins at an average price of about $73,078. Mining competitiveness itself actually improved — the company’s operational hash rate rose 22% year-over-year to 70.3 exahashes per second. Its bitcoin holdings, however, declined: MARA held 35,577 bitcoin worth roughly $2.1 billion as of quarter-end, down 29% from a year earlier, though that still ranks fourth-largest among publicly traded companies, behind Strategy, Twenty One Capital, and Metaplanet. MARA’s chief financial officer said on the earnings call that bitcoin prices had made for a difficult revenue environment, and that the company had focused during the quarter on fundamentally reshaping its power portfolio and capital structure. In February, MARA acquired a majority stake in Exaion SaS, which operates HPC data centers, secure cloud, and AI infrastructure, and that same month announced a partnership with Starwood Capital Group and Starwood Digital Ventures to convert some of its sites to serve enterprise, hyperscale, and AI customer demand.

CleanSpark likewise couldn’t escape the downturn. For its fiscal third quarter, ended June 30, revenue came in at $138.0 million, down 30.5% from $198.6 million a year earlier. The company posted a net loss of $239.8 million for the quarter, reversing a $257.4 million profit from the same period last year. Adjusted EBITDA also swung sharply, from a $377.7 million profit to a $113.0 million loss. As of the end of June, CleanSpark held roughly $814.9 million in combined cash and bitcoin, with total assets of $2.7 billion and long-term debt of about $1.8 billion. Its bitcoin treasury stood at 13,924 coins, ranking eleventh among publicly traded companies. CleanSpark’s strategy centers on turning the power infrastructure it built up for bitcoin mining into a new revenue stream, and it recently signed a 20-year, $6.6 billion lease agreement at its Sandersville facility with a tenant it described as having high investment-grade creditworthiness.

Structural issues across the broader industry are also weighing on results. The bitcoin network’s hash rate has climbed to record levels, meaning miners now need more computing power just to earn the same amount of bitcoin. That’s compounded by the lingering effects of a past halving event that cut block rewards in half, along with rising electricity and hardware costs that continue to squeeze mining margins. Companies like MARA and CleanSpark, which hold large bitcoin reserves, face an additional structural vulnerability: mark-to-market accounting rules amplify their losses whenever bitcoin prices fall.

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Against this backdrop, the pivot toward AI and HPC infrastructure is no longer a novel story for miners — it’s becoming an industry standard. Rival Core Scientific doubled its revenue, with AI and HPC hosting now accounting for 83% of sales, backed by a long-term deal with AMD. TeraWulf generated 71% of its revenue from HPC leasing and has signed contracts worth $19 billion. Hut 8 grew revenue 81% but still posted a net loss, and is in the process of commercializing its first AI campus. CleanSpark, by contrast, remains focused primarily on pure mining, betting instead on its $6.6 billion leasing deal.

Wall Street’s enthusiasm, however, isn’t what it used to be. An analysis by Blocksbridge Consulting of 25 AI and HPC deals announced between June 2024 and August 2026 found that average same-day stock price gains on deal announcements have fallen from roughly 24% for early deals to about 10% for more recent ones. Core Scientific’s first hosting deal with CoreWeave sent its stock up more than 40%, and TeraWulf’s initial agreement with Fluidstack drove nearly a 60% surge in its share price. But as more miners chase the same AI-pivot playbook, the market appears to be discounting the valuation premium once attached to the transformation narrative itself. Attention is shifting away from the appeal of the pivot story and toward actual execution, client quality, and the ability to generate stable cash flow. As of Tuesday morning, August 11, bitcoin was trading down 1.34% from the previous day on a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange.