Lekker Capital CIO Quinn Thompson on X argues that the collapse of the mining economy, combined with the growing shift of public miners towards AI and high-performance computing, could make corporate BTC hoards a new source of market supply.
“The huge underappreciated windfall for Bitcoin is the disaster that is the mining economy. The only cure is hashrate reduction, led by AI computing first movers such as CORZ, WULF, CIFR, IREN, etc.,” said Thompson.
A Thompson joint diagram depicts the problem visually. It shows that total bitcoin reserves across the major listed miners will continue to rise sharply through 2024 and 2025, before peaking in 2026. Thompson’s argument is not that the AI wheel is structurally inferior.
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Conversely, a lower hashrate and less economic competition may improve the health of the mining industry over time. His point is that the switch itself is expensive, and heavy AI facilities could force miners to liquidate BTC, which was previously viewed as a strategic asset.
“Although beneficial for the long-term health and stability of the network economy, it poses a price problem in the near future, because Bitcoin miners have about 80,000 bitcoins in their balance. As these companies move away from mining BTC, they 1) have a need to finance the capital of building AI, and 2) have no reason to hold their balance (BTC) before they keep it in their balance.
Bitcoin miners switch to AI
The 2025 proposals and public information make this point more concrete. Core Scientific’s fourth-quarter results showed that the business mix is shifting away from mining and toward AI-related infrastructure: mining revenue fell to $42.2 million from $79.9 million a year, while colocation revenue increased from $8.5 million to $31.3 million. Management said the decline in mining production reflected a “continued strategic shift” to high-density deployment. Over the course of 2025, Core earned $402.5 million from the sale of digital assets and ended the year with 2,537 BTC on its balance sheet.
TeraWulf offers even cleaner reading. The company said that by 2025 it had “reinforced HPC hosting as its key growth engine”, signed more than $12.8 billion in long-term customer contracts and built a platform with 522 megawatts of critical IT under contract. However, the old mining business was still monetized as this build took shape: digital asset revenue in the fourth quarter was $26.1 million, compared to HPC rental revenue of $9.7 million, and the company’s digital asset turnover at the end of the year was 1,496 BTC mined, 1,500 BTC left in the BTC balance alone. 31, 2025.
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Cipher and IREN show two other versions of the same trend. Cipher said it increased its focus on HPC in 2025, signing two HPC tenants for a combined 600 MW of data center capacity. It also sold about $214.7 million worth of bitcoin during the year. By the end of the year, Cipher classified $94.9 million worth of Black Pearl mining rigs as held for sale after signing a sublease to transition to an HPC tenant. IREN, on the other hand, has already taken the treasury issue off the table: with about 99,900 GPUs installed or as of December 31, 2025, it said it would “usually liquidate all the bitcoins we mine every day” and thus have no bitcoins on its balance sheet at the end of the year.
MARA is important for other reasons. It has yet to catch up to Core, TeraWulf, Cipher or IREN in turning its mining sites into a full-fledged AI/HPC business, although it has deployed its first ten AI racks in Granbury by November 2025 and later announced a partnership with Starwood for AI and HPC infrastructure. But MARA is the heavyweight of the group’s treasury, and its 2025 disclosure moved in Thompson’s direction: the company said it began selling bitcoin in the second half of 2025, sold about 4,076 BTC worth $413.1 million during the year, and still ended 2025 with about 825 BTC.
This is the thrust of Thompson’s thesis. A miner’s switch to AI can reduce hashrate pressure and improve the long-term economics of bitcoin mining. But money from mining to AI is capital intensive, and the 2025 documents show that money is already being financed from BTC sales, mining, and site conversions. For Bitcoin, this means that an industry correction that could be constructive later on can still be seen.
At press time, Bitcoin was at $72,322.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
