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Bitcoin's 25 per cent weekly rally has not fixed the arithmetic that broke the mining industry: cash costs sit near $88,000 a coin and MARA, Riot and CleanSpark are all still trading on negative earnings.
The 20-year contract at Rockdale, Texas is worth $9.1 billion at floor and up to $16.1 billion with two five-year extensions. It is Riot's second AI-compute lease inside six months.
The second-largest difficulty cut of 2026 reflects what miner earnings have been telegraphing all year: Marathon, Riot and their peers are pulling power and capital out of bitcoin mining and into AI data centres as fast as the contracts can be signed.
Listed bitcoin mining companies could derive as much as 70 per cent of their revenue from artificial intelligence infrastructure by December, according to Bloomberg, as production costs now exceed the price of the asset they were built to mine.
The Texas-based miner sold more than 2.5 times what it mined in the first quarter, reducing its bitcoin stack to 15,680 BTC and funnelling the proceeds into hashrate expansion and AI data centre infrastructure.
CoinShares' Q1 2026 mining report reveals that production costs have surged to $80,000 per bitcoin while hash prices hit five-year lows, accelerating a historic pivot toward AI infrastructure that could see listed miners derive the majority of revenue from artificial intelligence by year-end.
