While President Donald Trump continues to demand that all remaining Bitcoin be "made in the USA," the market is moving in the opposite direction.
According to a year-end report from Miner Weekly, North American mining pools saw a consistent decline in their share of total Bitcoin blocks successfully mined throughout 2025. This erosion of dominance is not due to a lack of ambition, but rather a cold calculation of margins as the domestic race for artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure cannibalizes the power once reserved for the hash rate.
Great power pivot
The shift is being driven by a fundamental transition in how large-scale energy assets are used. As noted by Miner Weekly, 2025 was the year that redefined the mining landscape through the lens of "exahash and gigawatt" scales. Publicly traded miners that once focused exclusively on securing the Bitcoin network are now pivoting to High Performance Computing (HPC) and AI data center hosting. The reason is simple. The revenue per kilowatt hour for AI workloads is significantly higher than the current yield from Bitcoin mining, especially following the 2024 halving.
Major firms, including Core Scientific and TeraWulf, have already signaled this shift, repurposing hundreds of megawatts of capacity to support the high-density power requirements of AI. For these companies, the priority has shifted from accumulating Bitcoin to securing long-term, high-margin contracts with tech giants. This domestic "brain drain" of power capacity is leaving a void that is being filled by offshore competitors, particularly in regions where electricity remains cheap, and the competition for AI infrastructure is less intense.
Shift in global hash share
The result of this pivot is a measurable decline in the US grip on the network. While the Trump administration has framed Bitcoin mining as a matter of national and energy security, the private sector is following the path of greatest return. The data shows that as North American pools lost ground, operators in other jurisdictions, including China and Ethiopia, have capitalized on the stagnant growth of the US hash rate. Despite the ongoing official ban on mining in China, the country’s share of the global hash rate remains resilient, often operating under the radar or utilizing stranded energy that is unattractive to the AI sector.
This global redistribution poses a challenge to the vision of a US-centric Bitcoin economy. If the trend of diverting domestic energy to AI continues, the US may find itself as a secondary player in network security, even as its institutional appetite for Bitcoin as an asset grows. For the seasoned investor, this indicates a decoupling of Bitcoin’s price from the geographic location of its production. The market is proving that it does not care about national borders or political rhetoric; it only cares about where the next gigawatt of power is cheapest and most profitable.
