Lekker Capital CIO Quinn Thompson argues on X that collapsing mining economics, combined with a growing shift by public miners toward AI and high-performance compute, could turn corporate BTC treasuries into a fresh source of market supply.
The chart Thompson shared, frames the problem visually. It shows aggregate bitcoin holdings across major listed miners climbing sharply through 2024 and 2025 before rolling over in 2026. Thompson’s argument is not that the AI pivot is bearish in structural terms.
On the contrary, lower hashrate and less uneconomic competition could improve mining industry health over time. His point is that the transition itself is expensive, and that capex-heavy AI buildouts may force miners to liquidate BTC that had previously been treated as strategic treasury.
“While helpful to long-term health and sustainability of the network economics, it presents a dilemma for prices in the near-term as Bitcoin miners hold almost 80,000 Bitcoin on their balance sheets. As these companies pivot away from BTC mining, they 1) need capital to fund the AI buildout capex requirements and 2) have no reason to hold any BTC on their balance sheet (not that they should have before either),” he argued.
Bitcoin Miners Pivot To AI TeraWulf offers an even cleaner read-through. The company said that in 2025 it “solidified HPC hosting as its primary growth engine,” signed more than $12.8 billion in long-term customer contracts, and built a platform with 522 critical IT megawatts under contract. Yet the legacy mining business was still being monetized as that buildout took shape: fourth-quarter digital asset revenue was $26.1 million, versus $9.7 million in HPC lease revenue, and the company’s year-end digital asset rollforward shows 1,496 BTC mined, 1,500 BTC disposed of, and only 3 BTC left on the balance sheet at Dec. 31, 2025.
Cipher and IREN show two other versions of the same trend. Cipher said it increased its focus on HPC in 2025 and signed two HPC tenants for a combined 600 MW of data center capacity. It also sold bitcoin for approximately $214.7 million during the year. By year-end, Cipher had classified $94.9 million of Black Pearl mining rigs as held for sale after signing a sublease to transition the site to an HPC tenant. IREN, by contrast, has already taken the treasury issue largely off the table: with roughly 99,900 GPUs installed or on order as of Dec. 31, 2025, it said it “typically liquidate[s] all the Bitcoin we mine daily” and therefore held no bitcoin on its balance sheet at year-end.
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $72,322.
