Core Scientific to Exit Bitcoin Mining by Year-End

Core Scientific, once one of the largest publicly listed Bitcoin miners in the United States, has put a firm date on its departure from the industry. The company now expects to finish winding down its Bitcoin mining operations during the fourth quarter of 2026, and to start 2027 as a dedicated host for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

"We expect to complete the wind-down during the fourth quarter and enter 2027 as a pure-play, high-density colocation provider," chief financial officer Jim Nygaard told analysts on the company's third-quarter earnings call last Thursday. Core Scientific had already said in a July filing that its hosted-mining business would end by December 31; the latest comments confirm that its own self-mining will be gone by the same point.

Mining Is Now a Rounding Error

The quarterly numbers show how far the shift has already gone. Self-mining revenue fell to $12.3 million, down from $57.4 million a year earlier, while income from hosting other companies' mining machines slipped to $5.2 million from $8.7 million. All told, Bitcoin mining brought in just $17.5 million — about 7.5% of Core Scientific's $232.9 million in third-quarter revenue. Colocation services, by contrast, generated $215.4 million.

The fleet has shrunk to match. According to Nygaard, the company had close to 50% fewer mining machines running at the end of September than it did at the end of 2025.

From "Expansion" to Full Exit

Core Scientific's turn towards AI began in 2024, when it signed a first hosting deal with GPU cloud provider CoreWeave in March, followed by a far larger agreement in June. At the time, the company pitched AI hosting as something it would do alongside Bitcoin mining, and stressed that it intended to keep its mining capacity intact.

That stance did not last. By December 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported that Core Scientific was aiming to wind down mining by 2028. Tough mining economics then accelerated the timeline: in the first quarter of 2026 the company booked $266.5 million in mining-related impairments, pointing to weaker Bitcoin prices, historically low hashprice — the revenue miners earn per unit of hashing power — and falling resale values for mining hardware. In the second quarter it also terminated a mining equipment agreement with Block and Proto, taking a $41.9 million loss.

Part of a Wider Trend

Core Scientific is not alone. Large miners across North America have been redirecting their power contracts, data-center sites and cooling infrastructure towards AI customers, who typically pay more stable, contract-based fees than the volatile block rewards and transaction fees that mining depends on. Fellow US miner American Bitcoin, for example, just reported that its cost to mine a single BTC rose about 15% quarter-on-quarter to roughly $42,100.

The move is not without its own risks. Following the recent US midterm elections, Reuters reported that opponents of data-center development were among the winners, with local backlash focusing on electricity bills and the strain large facilities put on community resources — pressures that apply to AI data centers just as much as to Bitcoin mines.

What It Means for Bitcoin

For the Bitcoin network itself, one company's exit changes little: Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment simply rebalances when hashrate leaves, and other miners pick up the slack. But Core Scientific's journey — from mining heavyweight to AI landlord in barely two years — is a clear signal of how thin margins have become since the last halving, and of how mining's power-hungry infrastructure is increasingly being valued for uses beyond securing the Bitcoin blockchain.