AI poached the rigs, but $BTC’s hashrate hit a seven-month high anyway

Bitcoin’s seven-day average hashrate recovered above 1 zettahash per second (ZH/s), equivalent to 1,000 exahashes per second (EH/s), reaching its highest level since March 3 and a seven-month high despite major publicly traded miners shifting capacity toward artificial intelligence. According to BlocksBridge Consulting’s latest Miner Weekly newsletter, the recovery suggests other operators are replacing lost computing power and leaving remaining network miners with little relief from competition.

Bitcoin’s mining difficulty increased 5.92% on Oct. 16, and BlocksBridge projects another 5.16% increase at the next adjustment. If that estimate holds, difficulty will have risen roughly 11.4% across two consecutive adjustments. “That’s hardly the breathing room remaining miners might have expected from the AI migration,” BlocksBridge wrote, referring to competition facing operators that have continued mining Bitcoin.

The shift toward AI has already taken substantial mining capacity offline. BlocksBridge previously reported a 23% decline in publicly traded miners’ realized hashrate, alongside a 52% quarterly increase in their reported AI and high-performance computing revenue. It estimated that the displaced capacity represented roughly $1.5 billion in mining hardware.

Smaller and mid-sized miners may be picking up the slack by buying equipment from larger operators, BlocksBridge said, pointing to Sazmining, which advertises secondhand Antminer S21 XP machines that buyers can deploy through hosting facilities in Paraguay and Texas. For miners with access to cheaper electricity, buying used machines could be more economical than investing in new equipment, while hardware displaced by AI conversions could continue mining Bitcoin elsewhere. It remains unclear how much of the equipment being sold came from publicly traded miners or how much has returned to the network.

The hashrate recovery comes as some industry observers view rising computing power as an “indirect bullish signal” for Bitcoin, reflecting continued institutional investment in publicly traded mining companies. CryptoQuant founder and CEO Ki Young Ju recently made that argument on X, writing that “higher hashrate means stronger security and better fundamentals as a store of value.”