Key Takeaways:
Bitcoin is now 52.4% sustainable energy-based, helping to stabilize grids and mitigate methane. Mining is getting more decentralized, as bigger players move into AI data centers. Analysts expect miners to buy more power infrastructure assets in 2026, as AI, Bitcoin and energy converge.Bitcoin mining reached an important threshold in 2025, with nearly 53% of the network now powered by renewable energy sources, up from 37% in 2022, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCA).
It was a dramatic shift in Bitcoin’s carbon footprint, which has long been criticized for damaging the climate. CCAF said miners are switching to more sustainable and low-carbon energy, including hydro, solar and wind.
Analysts expect the trend to accelerate in 2026, as miners grapple with thinner profit margins following the 2024 halving that cut block rewards, record network competition and growing rivalry from AI data centers.
“[This year marked] a general turning of tide towards increasingly positive independent reports and media coverage on Bitcoin mining and energy,” Daniel Batten, a climate and Bitcoin analyst, told Cryptonews.
Batten, who has tracked Bitcoin mining’s energy mix, said the Cambridge University’s 2025 report recognizes that mining “helps stabilize grids and mitigate methane,” not simply consuming fossil fuels.
Mitigation from methane alone offsets 5.5% of all Bitcoin network carbon emissions, according to CCAF. Scientists say methane gas has a global warming potential over 20 years that is 80x higher than carbon dioxide.
Bitcoin’s total emissions account for 0.08% of the global greenhouse gas emissions per year. For context, the figure is similar to the annual emissions of Slovakia and half that of the tobacco industry.
Bitcoin Miners Switch to Stranded Energy
In 2025, miners have been pushed toward cleaner power by economics as much as by regulation. Batten said with hashrate at record highs and the Bitcoin price largely choppy, profitability has tightened sharply.
It’s something that’s driven miners “to more stranded energy harvesting,” he said, seeking cheaper, underused energy sources like curtailed wind and solar or flared gas – energy that would otherwise go to waste.
“Hashrate is at an all-time high [while] BTC price [remains] flat – meaning it’s harder than ever to make a profit mining. But mining companies are finding ancillary revenue sources to stay profitable.”
Bitcoin’s hashrate, or the computational power used to mine and process transactions on a proof-of-work blockchain, has risen fourfold since 2022, per CCAF data.
Batten added that large, listed miners have started to buy energy assets outright rather than to rely on long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs).
For example, Marathon Digital Holdings (Mara) this year bought a wind farm, expanded into methane mitigation, and published a CDP, or carbon disclosure report, and a social responsibility report within six months.
“These things matter a lot to regulators and policymakers,” Batten said. “[They] make wider institutional adoption easier.”
Another major highlight of 2025 has been the rise of state-backed BTC mining. According to Batten, at least 10 countries are now mining Bitcoin directly or through government-linked entities using surplus electricity to build reserves without buying the cryptocurrency on the open market.
Bhutan has emerged as a prominent example, he said, using hydro-power to accumulate BTC. “[It’s] proving that mining is the most frictionless way to acquire a Bitcoin strategic reserve,” Batten said.
Bhutan holds anything from 6,000 BTC to over 11,000 BTC, depending on the analytics provider, making the tiny South Asian country one of the world’s largest sovereign holders of Bitcoin alongside the likes of the U.S.
Experts expect nation-state Bitcoin mining to continue in 2026, both in terms of the number of countries turning to mining and the scale of their operations, particularly in energy-rich emerging markets such as Ethiopia.
ASIC Arms Race Is Fading
Bitcoin’s hashrate soared above 1,000 exahashes per second in 2025, a sign of improved network security and also stronger competition among miners, according to Alejandro de La Torre, CEO and cofounder of DMND mining pool.
“2025 has been transformative for Bitcoin mining infrastructure,” de La Torre told Cryptonews in an interview.
He said one of the most important advances of 2025 was the maturation of next-generation mining protocols such as Stratum V2. The protocol allows individual miners, rather than pool operators, to select transactions that go into blocks, improving decentralization, security and efficiency.
“At DMND, we’ve witnessed institutional miners increasingly prioritize infrastructure that offers transaction selection capabilities and improved efficiency. A shift from the pure hashrate arms race of previous years.”
In 2026, De La Torre expects Stratum V2 adoption to rise, “as operators realize that decentralized transaction selection isn’t just ideological, it’s a competitive advantage that protects against single points of failure.”
He said miners are also under pressure from regulators and investors to adopt audited, transparent systems, as margins remain compressed.
The DMND cofounder expects miners to move in this direction next year, seeking what he calls the “assurance of SOC 2 Type II compliance, without sacrificing their transaction sovereignty.”
Meanwhile, hardware gains are slowing. Dragan Jovanovic is the founder of UK-based Bitcoin miner Terra Solis. He described 2025 as the year the “ASIC arms race” turned into an “ASIC treadmill,” telling Cryptonews:
“The best gear is already in the low‑teens joules per terahash (e.g., ~15 J/TH for top air rigs and ~12 J/TH for top hydro). Moore’s Law-style step-changes are fading, so the edge is shifting back to boring stuff like power price and uptime.”
At the same time, miners face congestion on electricity grids, which are increasingly dominated by data centers. In Texas, for example, the ERCOT interconnection queue for big loads soared to 226 gigawatts, with most applications coming from AI and high-performance computing projects.
“[That] nudged more miners toward ‘power without permission’, behind-the-meter and self-gen, not because it’s trendy, but because it’s available,” Jovanovic detailed.
Bitcoin Miners Pivot to AI
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) may be the biggest question for Bitcoin miners going into 2026, experts say.
In 2025, the “AI pivot stopped being a slide deck,” Jovanovic said, as some big companies halted their plans for mining expansion to evaluate AI and high-performance computing opportunities, cutting hashrate targets.
The effect is double-edged. On one hand, it tempers BTC hashrate growth by diverting power and capital. On the other hand, it increases competition for cheap electricity, with miners bidding against well-funded AI companies for the same sub-$0.04 per kilowatt-hour deals, according to Jovanovic.
“AI saved some struggling miners in 2025 by opening new revenue streams. We may even see dynamic facilities that switch between mining and AI tasks on the fly to chase the best margins.”
But the Terra Solis founder also warned that AI “drives costs up and could squeeze out less-efficient operators.”
Batten, the climate tech investor, sees the AI-Bitcoin mining convergence as inevitable, telling Cryptonews:
“I think next year you’ll see more miners pivot to AI, forced acquisitions, and the beginning of the end for large, stand-alone PPA-based Bitcoin mining company. [There’ll be] more energy asset purchases and more convergence between AI, and mining and energy companies.”
In June, Mara Holdings launched a project that leverages idle power from an AI data center to mine BTC. Earlier, rival Riot Platforms had announced it spent $1 billion on energy infrastructure for mining and AI operations.
Without leaps in ASIC performance, Jovanovic expects miners to double down on operational efficiency in 2026, “to wring out every watt of profit in an era of higher energy prices.”
U.S. wholesale power rates are projected to 8% higher next year.
“Grid bottlenecks will persist… which means more mines co-locating, where flexible Bitcoin loads can soak up cheap surplus and disengage during peak demand, a niche where AI data centers can’t easily compete.”
Lior Aizik, cofounder and chief operating officer of crypto exchange XBO, said miners’ focus on efficiency after the 2024 Bitcoin halving helped to stabilize hashpower and reduce forced selling during volatile times.
“Bitcoin mining is evolving into a professional, infrastructure-driven industry,” Aizik told Cryptonews. “[It’s now] closely connected to energy markets and capital markets, not just crypto cycles.”
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