In brief
- North American Bitcoin mining pools saw a decline in block share last year.
- The shift has been bolstered by demand for AI infrastructure.
- China’s energy build-out may be contributing as well.
America’s grip on Bitcoin mining is slipping as firms race to build out infrastructure for artificial intelligence, providing an opportunity for countries like China—despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s vision for technological dominance.
In 2025, North American pools, where miners combine computing power to better their chances of solving a block and obtaining the block reward, saw a consistent decline in block share, or the percentage of total Bitcoin blocks successfully mined, according to a recent report from BlocksBridge Consulting.
As of December, BlocksBridge said that Foundry USA, MARA Pool, and Luxor Technologies accounted for 35% of all Bitcoin blocks, down from more than 40% last January.
The decline follows Trump’s call for all remaining Bitcoin to be mined in the U.S. as a candidate in 2024. Although some described the feat as impossible, it underscored the president’s vision for a flourishing industry, which has generated controversy in the past over its potential long-term impact on local communities and the environment.
As rapid data center growth overshadows those concerns in various U.S. states, the president’s sons have also pushed forward with their own Bitcoin mining firm, American Bitcoin. Eric and Donald Trump Jr. co-founded the firm last March, which Miami-based Hut 8 owns an 80% majority stake in.
Hut 8, once dedicated to Bitcoin mining, is increasingly positioning itself as an energy infrastructure company. In December, the Miami-based company said that it would work with AI firm Anthropic to develop infrastructure for enormous data centers in the U.S.
A month before, Eric Trump stood on the floor of American Bitcoin’s Texas-based mining facility. He posted a video of himself speaking on X, as 35,000 mining machines whirred in the background, highlighting how the firm mines “about 2%” of the world’s Bitcoin supply.
Bitcoin mining is a competitive process, where specialized computers constantly crunch complex calculations to verify transactions and secure the network in exchange for newly minted Bitcoin. Over time, the largest players have seen margins squeezed.
In December, Bitcoin miners generated an average daily revenue of $38,700 per EH/s, or exahash per second, down 32% year-over-year, according to a recent JPMorgan note. The metric reflects how Bitcoin mining profitability is at record lows when considering the impact of energy prices, which have increased broadly over the past year.
Among many firms, the decline in profitability has bolstered a yearslong shift toward addressing the needs of AI firms, Nick Hansen, co-founder and CEO of Luxor Technology, a provider of Bitcoin mining software and financial services, told Decrypt.
“Every Bitcoin miner has a fiduciary responsibility right now to evaluate the feasibility of AI for any of their current power assets,” he said. “The AI demand is just so high that it just kind of dwarfs Bitcoin mining in terms of scale and potentially scope.”
Meanwhile, China has been rapidly increasing its power generation capacity. That means North America’s decline in blockshare, in some ways, is just as much about the country’s energy build-out as it is a pullback from American firms.
“You can use the proliferation of Bitcoin mining as a proxy to the energy infrastructure within a country,” he said. “They have a ton more energy, which means they are able to compete for Bitcoin blocks, which is kind of a buyer of last resort for energy.”
Movement in Xinjiang
In years past, Bitcoin miners were effectively engaged in an arms race as their operations scaled—but that’s changing, according to Wolfie Zhao, head of research at TheMinerMag. And it’s creating an opportunity for countries like China, he told Decrypt.
“A lot of the [publicly traded] miners are pausing hash rate expansion, and some of them are converting their power capacity for Bitcoin mining into [high performance computing],” he said. Hash rate refers to the computational resources being thrown at Bitcoin’s network.
In recent months, Zhao, who lives in Hong Kong, said there’s been a resurgence of hash rate in China, particularly in the province of Xinjiang. But Bitcoin mining has been officially banned in China since 2021, with renewed scrutiny as recently as December, per Blockspace Media.
Still, Zhao said Xinjiang is very dispersed, with a lot of power generated by burning fossil fuels. It’s impossible to truly know the scale of operations there, but Zhao said that the province’s distance from Beijing leads some to gamble on Bitcoin in defiance of the restrictions.
“There’s no doubt that this is still happening in Xinjiang,” Zhao said, noting that activity in the Middle East and Russia have also contributed to the shift in Bitcoin’s hash rate.
Last year, Zhao said that companies producing Bitcoin mining machines, like Bitmain, were faced with a “cruel reality,” as overall demand cooled for their products. To compensate for a decline in revenue, he said that the company based in Beijing was forced to mine more Bitcoin itself.
“They had to make use of their own inventory and plug in machines wherever they could,” he said. “That’s probably in the U.S., in the Middle East, and Central Asia.”
Controlling an estimated 80% of the global market for Bitcoin mining equipment, Zhao said that Bitmain risks losing out on future allocations of wafers from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) if it decides to scale back production.
“There’s an oversupply,” he added. “Not many companies are buying at the same scale.”
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Source: https://decrypt.co/354627/americas-grip-bitcoin-mining-slips-despite-trump-ambitions-dominance
