Bitcoin Updates: Miners Offload $2.6 Billion in Holdings Amid Escalating AI Power Struggle

Bitcoin’s slide below $90,000 at the end of November 2025 has created a challenging environment for miners, as rising electricity expenses and a record-breaking hashrate are squeezing profits, prompting many to sell their assets at rates never seen before. The digital currency’s 30% plunge from its October high of $126,000 has wiped out close to $1.5 trillion in market capitalization, with Bitcoin now hovering near $82,605 after a 23% monthly decline—the steepest since the 2022 downturn

. This wave of selling has matched a 35% drop in perpetual futures open interest from October’s $94 billion high, indicating a decrease in speculative trading .

Miners are feeling the brunt of the downturn, as their earnings have been slashed by a 50% fall in hashprice—the standard for measuring mining revenue—to $34.49 per petahash per second, marking a historic low

. This sharp decline comes amid soaring power prices in major mining regions. On Texas’s ERCOT grid, wholesale electricity rates jumped 18% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2025, fueled by demand from AI data centers, which are expected to double U.S. electricity usage to 400 terawatt-hours by 2030 . In response, miners have been selling off their reserves: more than 30,000 BTC, valued at $2.6 billion, was transferred to exchanges in November alone, pushing miner-held Bitcoin down to a new low of 1.803 million BTC .

The pressure is also visible in ETF activity, as BlackRock’s iShares

Trust (IBIT) saw a single-day withdrawal of $523 million on November 18—the largest since its 2024 debut—and $1.425 billion in redemptions over five days . This reflects a broader trend of risk aversion, with U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs experiencing $2.3 billion in outflows during the first half of November . Marathon Digital and have both acknowledged operational challenges, with Core Scientific securing multi-year contracts for AI workloads that generate three to four times the revenue of Bitcoin mining .

Amid these upheavals, a $40 billion AI infrastructure alliance led by BlackRock, Nvidia, and Microsoft has become a significant development. The Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership (AIP) plans to acquire Aligned Data Centers, a key player in large-scale infrastructure, with $30 billion in equity and a total capacity of $100 billion

. This initiative highlights the industry’s shift toward AI-focused operations, as companies like C3.ai expand their integration with Microsoft Copilot and Azure AI Foundry to simplify enterprise AI adoption. Meanwhile, IREN’s stock jumped 11.97% after securing $9.7 billion and $5.8 billion contracts with Microsoft and Dell for GPU cloud services, underscoring the intense competition for computing power.

The intersection of declining Bitcoin prices, higher mining costs due to energy, and major investments in AI infrastructure points to a fundamental transformation. Miners now find themselves vying with AI companies for access to the power grid, while ETF outflows reveal growing caution among institutional investors.

, with hashprice lingering at unsustainable lows, they caution that a prolonged period of miner capitulation may follow unless Bitcoin prices rebound to cover operational expenses.