Core Scientific and TeraWulf Now Earn More From AI Than Bitcoin Mining

Two of the industry’s best-known Bitcoin mining companies now make most of their money from something that isn’t mining at all.

Core Scientific pulled in $136.7 million in colocation revenue last quarter against just $27.5 million from Bitcoin mining, and is building out 400 megawatts of new capacity dedicated entirely to AI data centers. TeraWulf posted a similar split: $31.9 million in high-performance computing lease revenue, roughly 71% of its $44.8 million in total quarterly revenue, compared to $12.8 million from mining, backed by long-term agreements with Anthropic and Fluidstack.

Both companies are leaning on the same underlying asset, cheap power and purpose-built data center infrastructure originally assembled for mining rigs, and simply renting it to AI compute customers instead. The shift didn’t require abandoning mining operations entirely, just letting the AI side of the business scale faster and now genuinely outgrow it.

Bitcoin’s hash rate and network security don’t actually depend on any single miner’s revenue mix, but the trend says something about where the smartest capital in the mining industry currently sees the better return: AI compute leasing, not block rewards, and probably for a while.

Want to understand what actually happens to mining rewards and industry economics after each Bitcoin halving? Learn more in the Bitcoin Academy.