Bitcoin Miner Core Scientific Offloads 1,900 BTC in Major Pivot to AI

Another major Bitcoin miner is flipping the script—dumping digital gold to chase artificial intelligence.

The Great Compute Migration

Core Scientific just unloaded a staggering 1,900 BTC from its treasury. That's not a routine rebalance; it's a strategic capital shift. The move signals a deeper industry trend: the most sophisticated mining operations are now viewing their massive data centers and power contracts as dual-purpose assets. When the Bitcoin hash rate gets crowded, they can pivot the juice to power hungry AI training models.

Follow the Money, Follow the Watts

The calculus is brutally simple. AI compute demand is exploding, and the infrastructure—high-capacity data halls, robust cooling, and gigawatt-scale power agreements—is eerily similar to what's needed for industrial-scale mining. For a publicly-traded firm like Core Scientific, the pressure to show growth beyond volatile crypto rewards is immense. Redirecting capital from a speculative asset (BTC) to a service (AI compute) with recurring revenue looks mighty good on a quarterly earnings call—even if it means betting against the very ecosystem that built them.

The New Power Play

This isn't just about selling Bitcoin; it's about redeploying the industry's most valuable hidden asset: energy access. Miners have spent years securing prime power contracts in deregulated markets. That stranded power is now becoming the hottest commodity in tech. The playbook is being rewritten in real-time: mine Bitcoin when it's profitable, sell the coins to fund expansion, and lease the infrastructure to AI startups when it's not. It's a hedge that Wall Street can finally understand—a cynical, but perhaps necessary, evolution for an industry tired of being called 'wasteful.'

One miner's pivot is a sector's wake-up call. The race isn't just for the next block anymore; it's for control of the underlying power that makes both blockchains and large language models possible. The future of compute is up for grabs, and the Bitcoin miners are suddenly holding some of the best cards. Just don't ask your traditional portfolio manager to explain it.

Core Scientific Expects To Sell All Of Its Bitcoin Holdings In Q1 2026

Core Scientific has filed its annual report with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and it reveals key insights about the direction that the company is taking right now.

Originally a Bitcoin mining-focused firm, Core Scientific is among the largest public miners in the world, but recently, the firm has been making a push into the AI compute business.

At the end of 2024, the company had a total computing power or “Hashrate” amounting to 20.1 exahashes per second (EH/s). The 2025 annual report suggests that this metric has dropped to 17.9 EH/s as the AI expansion has occurred.

Not just that, the report also noted that Core Scientific expects to monetize substantially all of its Bitcoin holdings during 2026, with the majority of sales occurring within the first quarter. This selling has already begun, as the firm announced in its Q4 2025 earnings call that it sold over 1,900 BTC for $175 million in January.

Before the sale, the firm held 2,537 BTC, but now, that figure has dropped to just 630 BTC. Considering the SEC filing, CORE Scientific plans to eventually part with these remaining tokens as well.

So, where are the funds from the BTC sales going? Not mining, it seems. The company noted in the filing:

Aside from the miners received in 2025 and those expected from Block, we do not anticipate entering into new large-scale bitcoin mining equipment procurement agreements as we continue to shift capital allocation toward HDC infrastructure

While Core Scientific has pulled back on its Hashrate over the course of 2025, the firm remains among the top 10 public BTC miners, according to data from BitcoinMiningStock. With expansions stopping in favor of the AI pivot, though, it only remains to be seen how long the company will maintain relevance as a miner.

A push into the High-Performance Computing (HPC) business is actually something that’s being witnessed across the Bitcoin mining industry at the moment. Bitdeer, Cango, and Bitfarms, placed first, fifth, and tenth on the top 10 list, respectively, are all making a pivot to datacenters.

Bitfarms, in particular, plans to wind down its mining facilities over the course of 2026 and 2027, signaling a complete exit from the space. Ben Gagnon, the firm’s CEO, believes the pivot to be highly lucrative, explaining:

Despite being less than 1% of our total developable portfolio, we believe that the conversion of just our Washington site to GPU-as-a-Service could potentially produce more net operating income than we have ever generated with Bitcoin mining.

BTC Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $68,200, up more than 6% over the past week.