US elections have consequences for BTC block reward miners

TL;DR: Democrats’ midterm sweep threatens Bitcoin miners’ pivot to artificial intelligence (AI), especially in Texas, where a pause in data center construction will remain. With BTC below $73,000 and mining costs above $90,000, miners are selling BTC and exiting mining. Only ABTC grew its treasury.

Key Takeaways:

• The 2026 U.S. midterm elections have consequences for Bitcoin miners and AI data centers.
• Riot Platforms’ all-in cost to mine one BTC reached $78,805 in Q3 2026, which is 111% of BTC’s average Q3 price of $70,855.
• Core Scientific sold 3,374 BTC in 2026 and is looking to unload its final 32 BTC as it exits Bitcoin mining by year-end.
• IREN expects its Bitcoin mining operations to be “immaterial” in 2027.
• Cipher Digital devotes just 3% of its 6.8 GW of contracted and pipeline capacity to Bitcoin mining.
• American Bitcoin Corp’s Q3 mining output fell to 891 BTC and its mining revenue fell to $63.4 million, yet its BTC treasury grew to 8,427 tokens.

America’s midterm elections will have consequences for block reward miners pivoting to AI as the economics of producing a single BTC worsens.

America’s current political climate hasn’t been great for BTC miners, as the token’s dogged determination to lift itself off the price canvas it hit this summer keeps getting derailed. After topping $86,000 in September, the token has struggled to hold that level, and the fallout from last week’s midterm election results helped drag the price back below $73,000 in mid-Tuesday trading.

That’s not great, as the average all-in cost of mining a single BTC was over $90,000 as of early Tuesday. That’s not helped by BTC’s mining difficulty rate currently sitting at 148.4 trillion hashes (guesses) required to ‘find’ a new block on the network, a level not seen since January. Fortunately, the network’s next difficulty adjustment on November 13 is expected to fall 5% to just under 141 trillion hashes, so, you know, bullish.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s midterm election sweep could negatively impact miners who’ve focused on ‘pivoting’ from mining to serving as data centers for AI and other high-performance computing (HPC) clients. (So, nearly all of them.)

Many of these pivoting miners have placed big bets on building new data centers in Texas, which was hit by a thoroughly unanticipated Blue wave last week. The formerly deepest of Deep Red states had rolled out the welcome mat for miners/data centers, with (now outgoing) Gov. Gregg Abbott realizing too late that voters really weren’t all that fond of his willingness to turn over the Lone Star State’s power and water to Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa won her race in part due to her pledge to maintain Abbott’s belated pause on new data center construction until the state legislature can write new rules governing the AI sector. Given that the state’s House of Representatives is now also ruled by Democrats—many of whom ran on anti-data center platforms—those new rules could prove unhelpful to pivoting profits. Or gridlock might prevent new rules from being passed, leaving the data center ‘pause’ on pause for an even longer period.

With similar pauses/halts pledged by incoming governors in Georgia and New Mexico, and new restrictions coming in other states, analysts quickly trimmed their share price forecasts for operators who’d yet to secure final approval for data center development/expansion.

A warmer welcome may lie a little further east, as Florida voters narrowly rejected the Dems’ anti-data-center gubernatorial candidate, and Governor-elect Byron Donalds may take a less harsh view of this sector. Then again, it remains to be seen how much enthusiasm there is for building complex electrical installations in a region known as a hurricane magnet.

Riot mining production rises, but costs outpace price

Ironically, the miners doing the hardest AI pivots have contributed significantly to BTC’s price struggles, making life even worse for the few companies that remain solely focused on mining. Miners utterly dominate the chart of public companies that have sold the most BTC this year, accounting for ~$7.5 billion of the over $8 billion worth of BTC sold (so far) in 2026.

Second among major sellers is Riot Platforms (NASDAQ: RIOT), which has dumped 20,264 BTC as of November 10, including 10,599 tokens in the third quarter alone, leaving Riot with just 2,418 BTC as of September 30. It will shock no one to learn that the $1.5 billion generated by Q3 sales is primarily being used to fund further data center development.

This includes Riot’s new 15-year triple-net powered land lease with “a leading Frontier AI Lab” that will claim the entire 910 MW capacity of Riot’s campus outside Corsicana, Texas. Riot says the deal ensures ~$28 billion in revenue over the life of the contract, whose unspecified tenant is the same one that signed a lease for Riot’s Rockdale site earlier this year (so let’s just cut the subterfuge and call them Anthropic already).

While billions lie on the horizon, Riot’s Q3 earnings showed data center revenue of just $18.4 million, down from $23.2 million in Q2. Overall revenue was basically flat at $181.4 million and includes $47 million in engineering revenue, as Riot farms out its custom electrical gear know-how to third-party data center developers.

Mining revenue totaled $116 million, slightly better than Q2’s $113.7 million, but significantly below the nearly $161 million in Q3 2025. Riot’s BTC production totaled 1,637 tokens, up from 1,406 a year ago, reflecting the steep decline in BTC’s fiat price since last year.

The mining revenue figure includes $24.7 million in ‘power curtailment credits,’ i.e., Riot being paid by local governments to switch off ASIC mining rigs when electrical grids are under strain.

Riot’s cost to produce a single BTC token hit $39,265 in Q3, but that cost rose to $78,805 once ASIC depreciation was factored in. That total cost equals 111.2% of the average $70,855 value of a single BTC produced in Q3.

All told, Riot eked out a $4 million profit in Q3, although that’s down from over $104 million in the same period last year. Costs jumped 80% year-on-year to $180.2 million, and that figure would have been significantly higher were it not for the nearly $172 million year-on-year gain on the value of the BTC still in Riot’s possession.

On the analyst call, Riot CEO Jason Les was asked how the new Anthropic deal would impact mining operations at the Corsicana facility. Les said, “We will not need to take down Bitcoin mining to achieve the first 400 MW tranche, but we will need to take it down as we prepare for the second phase … you can probably expect Bitcoin mining capacity at the site to begin ramping down sometime in the summer of 2027.”

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Core Scientific still looking to unload last 32 BTC

Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ) sold 3,374 BTC this year, leaving its BTC treasury at just 32 BTC. Core says it will be “opportunistic in monetizing our remaining Bitcoin holdings, subject to market conditions and our treasury strategy.” That ‘strategy’ seems to be little more than ‘everything must go’ by this point, but time will tell.

Core realized total proceeds of $252 million via its 2026 BTC sales, reflecting both its need for cash and its intention to “continue winding down” its mining operations as it pivots hard to AI/HPC. Core even paid $42 million earlier this year to terminate its order for a batch of Proto Global ASIC rigs produced by the mining hardware offshoot of Jack Dorsey’s payment processor Block Inc (NASDAQ: XYZ).

Core had 50% fewer ASICs in operation as of September 30 than at the end of 2025, and CEO Adam Sullivan told analysts that the company expects to “complete our exit from Bitcoin mining by year end.” This will allow Core to “enter 2027 as a pure-play high-density colocation provider.”

Core’s Q3 self-mining revenue was just $12.3 million, down from $57.4 million in the same period last year. For the year-to-date, mining revenue totaled $63.9 million, down from $187 million a year ago. Hosted mining revenue was similarly negative, totaling $5.2 million in Q3, down from $8.7 million in Q325.

The cost of mining (both self and hosted) tumbled in Q3 due to Core’s reduced operations, although self-mining still resulted in a $7.5 million gross loss (up from just $2 million in Q325). Obviously, this won’t be a factor going forward.

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IREN expects “immaterial” mining contributions in 2027

IREN (NASDAQ: IREN) sold 2,774 BTC this year, using the resulting $207 million to buy the world’s rarest Care Bear dolls. Just kidding, they’re funding AI buildout. The sales have left precisely zero BTC on IREN’s balance sheet, and the company is selling newly mined tokens as fast as they come in.

The three months ending September 30 are technically IREN’s fiscal Q1, during which its revenue totaled $228 million, up sharply from $137 million in the quarter ending June 30 (its fiscal Q4). Of this, just $28 million came from BTC mining, less than half the $67 million mining contributed in Q4.

Meanwhile, AI Cloud Services revenue nearly doubled to $135 million, while AI Cloud Lease revenue—an entirely new segment—added $65 million. As impressive as IREN’s AI growth is, the costs of winding down mining while building out AI resulted in a net loss of $263 million for Q1. However, that’s a sight better than the $673 million loss in Q4 (which included a $450 million charge for impairment of assets, no prizes for guessing which assets).

IREN previously stated its intention to ‘effectively decommission’ its mining ops by year’s end. On the earnings call, CFO Anthony Lewis said the company aims to “substantially complete this transition” by year’s end, leaving only “immaterial” mining ops in 2027. There were no questions about mining on the call, leaving no question as to how important the market views this segment relative to AI/HPC ops.

Like many AI-focused firms, IREN’s shares tanked following last week’s midterms, but IREN’s shares have fallen over 45% in just the past 30 days. Part of the plunge came via IREN’s announcement that $4 billion in revenue it expected to book in calendar 2026 now won’t arrive until early next year.

IREN co-CEO Daniel Roberts said AI client Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) had “made a request to reconfigure and upgrade some of the network infrastructure” to better handle new frontier AI models, but Roberts insisted this was only a delay.

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Cipher devotes just 3% of future capacity to mining

Cipher Digital (formerly Cipher Mining) sold 2,252 BTC for $168 million this year, including 632 tokens in Q3. Cipher finished the quarter with less than $26 million worth of BTC on its balance sheet, down from $125 million at the end of 2025.

Cipher reported revenue of $26.7 million in Q3, barely a third of the $71.7 million it reported in the same period last year. Of this, $20.8 million came from mining, down from $24.8 million in the second quarter of 2026, reflecting the company’s Bitcoin Mining Exit Strategy that necessitated its rebranding. Q3 saw the first fruits of its AI/HPC pivot, with HPC leasing revenue totaling $5.85 million.

Cipher booked a net profit of $31.6 million in Q3, a significant turnaround from the $3.3 million loss in the same period last year and the $267.5 million loss in Q2. However, this swing was primarily due to a $127 million non-cash gain on a warrant liability.

Cipher’s map of its total 6.8 GW of ‘contracted and pipeline capacity’ shows just 3% devoted to mining. But the fact that nearly all of this capacity is in Texas likely contributed to Cipher’s share price falling by more than half over the past 30 days. However, it rebounded somewhat following its earnings release.

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ABTC mining output, revenue falls, but BTC treasury rises

American Bitcoin Corp (NASDAQ: ABTC), the Trump-linked mining operation that was spun off from Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT) last year, sold 466 BTC in Q3. Despite these sales, which it insists were solely to cover operating costs, ABTC increased its BTC treasury by over 400 tokens since June 30 to 8,427 as of September 30.

ABTC mined 891 BTC in Q3, down from 932 in Q2, resulting in Q3 mining revenue of $63.4 million, down from $67 million in Q2. The cost to mine a single BTC increased by over 15% from Q2, reflecting “higher seasonal power costs.”

ABTC booked a Q3 profit of $126 million, a significant turnaround from Q2’s $57.2 million loss, which was weighed down by the falling value of its BTC treasury. Conversely, Q3’s profit came as BTC’s price rebounded, adding a $197.3 million boost to the treasury value.

ABTC finished the quarter with 889,242 ASIC rigs capable of a hash rate of 28.1 EH/s, good for fifth place on the overall hash distribution chart (up one position from Q2).

As one of the few remaining ‘pure play’ miners, ABTC should have been spared the post-midterms carnage that weighed down its AI-pivoting rivals. But the ties to the Trump family and the prospect of Congressional Democrat probes—possibly examining ABTC’s relationship with Chinese ASIC maker Bitmain, which was said to be under a U.S. federal probe related to national security—helped push ABTC’s share price down nearly one-quarter since the election.

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FAQs:

How did the midterms affect Bitcoin miners?
New Democratic governors in Texas, Georgia, and New Mexico pledged to pause or halt data center construction. That hurts miners pivoting to AI, and analysts cut share price forecasts for operators without final approvals.

How much does it cost to mine one Bitcoin?
The average all-in cost was over $90,000 in early November, while BTC traded below $73,000. Mining difficulty is expected to drop 5% on November 13.

Why are miners selling BTC?
To fund AI data center buildouts. Miners account for about $7.5 billion of the more than $8 billion in BTC that public companies sold in 2026.

Is Riot still mining Bitcoin?
Yes, but Riot leased its 910 MW Corsicana site to an AI lab for about $28 billion. Mining there will begin to ramp down in summer 2027.

Why did IREN stock drop?
IREN’s shares fell over 45% in 30 days after the midterms.

What is Cipher Digital?
It’s the new name for Cipher Mining. Only 3% of its 6.8 GW pipeline is devoted to mining.

Is ABTC still a pure-play miner?
Yes. The Trump-linked miner ranks fifth globally by hash rate, finishing the quarter with 889,242 ASIC rigs capable of a hash rate of 28.1 EH/s.

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Watch: The Truth About Mining Profitability