Cipher, Hyperscale continue to offload BTC sale to fund AI pivot

An increasing number of miners have been letting go of their Bitcoin holdings to fund a pivot into AI data centers, and just a few days into August, more Bitcoin has been sold for the same purpose.

Cipher Digital (NASDAQ: CIFR) and Hyperscale Data (NYSEAMERICAN: GPUS) are the latest miners to sell Bitcoin. So far, the number of Bitcoins sold by public miners has crossed 15,000 since their treasuries peaked.

Hyperscale Data cashed out 150 coins in a single week

In a company release, Hyperscale Data said its Bitcoin holdings stood at 959 coins, worth about $60.8 million, after it converted around 150.5 BTC into $9.6 million during the week that ended August 2.

The company is not the only miner that is draining the treasury they once built up. In July, Empery Digital sold 1,400 BTC at an average of $62,200, raising about $87.1 million to pay down debt and buy a stake in a Midwest data center project. Bitdeer took its holdings to zero back in February.

Cipher’s mining revenue slid as the data center bet piled up losses

Cipher Digital, formerly Cipher Mining, released its second-quarter revenue figures on August 4. It recorded a revenue of $25 million and an adjusted EBITDA of negative $30 million.

Its mining revenue declined by 29% from the previous quarter, and the firm registered a net loss of $267.5 million, a figure that included a $150.5 million non-cash warrant charge. Following the release, Cipher shares dropped 10.2% to $21.69 on the day.

The company signaled this direction in February, when it rebranded to Cipher Digital and told investors on its Q4 2025 earnings call that it planned to liquidate the rest of its Bitcoin treasury during 2026 to pay for the infrastructure switch.

Cipher has raised $3.73 billion across three senior secured bond offerings to build its Barber Lake and Black Pearl campuses. CEO Tyler Page stated that they delivered their first HPC data center capacity ahead of schedule with rent at Black Pearl starting two months early in August.

What is pushing miners toward AI?

The reason why many miners have been selling off their holdings is that the economics stopped working. A report showed that the weighted-average cash cost to produce one Bitcoin among listed miners reached roughly $79,995 in Q4 2025, while the price sat in the $68,000 to $70,000 band. That gap left miners losing an estimated $19,000 on every coin they mined.

The response to these losses has been a pivot, with many rushing toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing work.

More than $70 billion in AI and HPC contracts have been announced across the public mining sector, and some operators could pull as much as 70% of their revenue from AI by the end of 2026. Cipher, TeraWulf, MARA Holdings, Core Scientific, and Hut 8 have all moved to repurpose power capacity for AI tenants.

An option near San Antonio, and a regulator in the way

Cipher used its Q2 update to disclose an option on a 900-megawatt site called Apollo, which is around 25 miles from San Antonio, Texas, and said a separate bond deal reimbursed it $56.7 million while funding its Stingray campus. The land has been submitted through the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) Batch Zero process.

However, the project now faces a snag, and this time around it is political. Texas Governor Greg Abbott told regulators to review data-center projects before they advance in the grid-approval queue.

With that directive, ERCOT has paused its Batch Zero transmission study.

The halt adds uncertainty to Apollo and much of Cipher’s 4.4-gigawatt development pipeline, on top of construction and leverage risk. Cipher projects net operating income of $97 million this year, climbing to $686 million in 2027.

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