Core Scientific plans to exit Bitcoin mining by the end of 2026

Core Scientific built its business as one of the largest US Bitcoin miners, running hundreds of megawatts of rigs across Texas and other states. Like Marathon and Riot, it has spent the past two years courting AI and high-performance-computing tenants instead of adding hashrate, a shift that gathered pace after the 2022 mining downturn squeezed margins. Coinpedia notes it is not alone: colocation leasing to AI customers has become the default pivot for miners facing high power costs and thin crypto returns.

The company has already sold nearly its entire Bitcoin reserve to fund construction of AI-ready data centers, and mining now brings in just 7.5% of quarterly revenue. Investors trade exposure to Bitcoin's hashrate economics for leasing income from a single dominant customer, concentrating risk differently rather than removing it. Equipment once dedicated to mining rigs will be repurposed or retired, and staff tied to mining operations face reassignment or layoffs as the fleet winds down through 2026.

A former Bitcoin-mining heavyweight becoming a 'pure-play data center provider' says something uncomfortable about proof-of-work economics at scale: when leasing racks to AI firms is more reliable than mining the coin itself, the miner-as-infrastructure thesis starts to look more like infrastructure than Bitcoin. That doesn't settle whether other large miners will follow, but it sharpens the question of whether 'Bitcoin miner' as a category still describes what these companies actually do for revenue.

CFO Jim Nygaard's timeline, laid out on the Q3 earnings call, sets December 2026 as the hard stop for mining and 2027 as the first full year as a dedicated high-density colocation provider. Watch whether Core Scientific hits that Q4 2026 shutdown date on schedule, and whether it adds customers beyond its current dominant tenant before then, since that concentration is the clearest unresolved risk in the new business model.

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