An assessment has emerged that the bitcoin network has entered a "hashrate bear market" for the first time.

CoinPost, a blockchain media outlet, reported on Sept. 3 that Rafa Zagli, CEO of investment firm Twenty One Capital, pointed to the trend at "Bitcoin Asia 2026" in Hong Kong.

Hashrate refers to the total mining computing power deployed across the bitcoin network. Zagli said the network hashrate rose to about 1.3 zettahash per second late last year and has since been in a gentle decline. He added it is taking the longest time yet to regain the previous peak. The core of his remarks was that an indicator seen not as bitcoin's price but as the network's underlying strength has been stagnating or retreating for a prolonged period.

He said the current phase differs from the sharp drop seen after the Chinese government's mining ban in 2021. At the time, the hashrate fell quickly as operations halted, but it recovered relatively fast as mining equipment moved to other regions. Now, by contrast, the options for how to use power and facilities have changed. Zagli said the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) is the biggest turning point.

The business models of listed mining firms are also changing quickly. Zagli said most listed miners are moving away from a large-scale, bitcoin-only mining model and shifting their focus to AI businesses.

The backdrop is a gap in profitability per unit of electricity. The contract rates for miners to lease power facilities to AI operators are now well above the mining hash price. Companies judge that shifting to AI and HPC is more advantageous even if they accept capital spending of $8 million to $15 million per megawatt, including cooling systems.

The trend is also evident in contract size. The cumulative value of AI and HPC-related contracts announced by listed miners surpassed $70 billion as of September 2026. Substations and transmission networks built for mining are being repurposed as infrastructure to supply power to major cloud and AI companies such as CoreWeave, Microsoft and Anthropic.

Some companies have already seen their revenue mix change. Core Scientific and TerraWulf generate more AI-related revenue from data centre leasing than from mining. KIL Infrastructure has eliminated all of its mining bases in the United States. Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, Mara Holdings and Bitdeer, meanwhile, are keeping mining operations while also pursuing AI and HPC power contracts and facility conversions.

As a result, the competitive benchmark in the bitcoin mining industry appears to be shifting from expanding mining equipment to securing power and building data centre conversion capabilities. If the hashrate bear market becomes prolonged, both the pace of network growth and miners' revenue models are increasingly likely to be more affected by competition with the AI infrastructure market.