Bitdeer, CleanSpark, BitFuFu, and Canaan each released May production updates this month. The reports landed against a difficult price backdrop. Bitcoin fell roughly 10% across May, sliding from around $81,286 on May 5 to $73,105 by May 29, according to Fortune. That price pressure, combined with major operators shifting capacity toward GPU compute, pulled the Bitcoin network's total hashrate (the combined computing power securing the network) down from more than 1,000 exahashes per second to between approximately 830 and 930 EH/s by early June. On June 5, the network responded with a 9.21% downward difficulty adjustment, one of the sharpest corrections in recent months.

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Bitdeer leads on volume; AI revenue grows alongside

Bitdeer posted the strongest production figure of the group at 921 BTC, a 370% increase year-over-year, while maintaining 70.2 EH/s of hashrate, the largest self-mining hashrate of any publicly listed company. The Singapore-headquartered company is also building a parallel revenue stream through its AI Cloud service, which reached approximately $69 million in annualised recurring revenue backed by 4,184 GPUs running at 92% utilisation.

According to Bitdeer's SEC Form 6-K filing, the GPU fleet includes H100, H200, B200, and GB200 units. The company is pursuing a hybrid approach, using Bitcoin mining cash flows to fund infrastructure that increasingly targets AI workloads.

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CleanSpark sells nearly all production; builds out power capacity

CleanSpark mined 671 BTC in May, averaging 21.66 BTC per day and hitting a single-day peak of 23.16 BTC. The company sold 654 of those coins at an average price of $79,934, converting 97.5% of its May production rather than holding.

CleanSpark now holds 13,470 BTC in reserve. The company has contracted 1.8 gigawatts of power capacity and has also secured a 100-megawatt AI data center in Wyoming, though it has not been confirmed whether that facility is counted within the 1.8 GW contracted total.

That sell strategy reflects a pattern visible among some operators in the public mining sector: converting BTC to fund operational transitions rather than accumulating at current price levels. Industry data from WuBlock shows public miners sold 32,000 BTC in the first quarter of 2026, already exceeding total sales for all of 2025. The picture across the sector is not uniform, however. As the following section shows, BitFuFu and Canaan are actively accumulating Bitcoin, illustrating a genuine divergence in strategy rather than a shared directional shift.

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Smaller operators diverge on strategy

BitFuFu reported 177 BTC produced, up 22.1% month-over-month, but its overall hashrate declined from 22.4 EH/s to 19.5 EH/s, partly due to a 14.4% reduction in power capacity from a prior base of 346 megawatts. Notably, self-mining crossed 50% of total output for the first time, reaching 90 BTC. "We view the current Bitcoin price environment as an attractive long-term accumulation opportunity, and we have proactively shifted resources toward self-mining," said CEO Leo Lu in the company's June 9 press release.

Canaan, primarily an ASIC chip manufacturer (the company makes the Avalon line of mining hardware), reported 90 BTC from its own mining operations plus 24 BTC received as payment from customers. The company's joint venture sites contributed approximately 45 BTC in May, though output there was partially suppressed by wildfire disruption during the period. Canaan also reached an agreement with Tether to deploy modular, immersion-cooled Avalon hash board modules in South America, a deal designed to reduce the upfront capital required for hardware deployment in infrastructure-constrained markets.

The company's treasury reached a record 1,867 BTC and 3,952 ETH. Canaan's North American fleet hit a record efficiency of 17.9 joules per terahash, an 11% improvement year-over-year, meaning the fleet now consumes 11% less energy per unit of computing power. Its all-in power cost sits at $0.043 per kilowatt-hour, among the lowest in the industry.

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Regional implications: Africa and South Asia

The June difficulty adjustment matters most for miners operating with higher electricity costs. The BT-Miners analysis of the drop notes it provides meaningful relief for operators paying between $0.09 and $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, a range that covers many grid-connected African miners. Ethiopia remains the continent's most significant mining market, drawing institutional operators with surplus hydroelectric power and supportive government policy.

Nigeria and South Africa lead Africa in crypto adoption (10.3% and 19.6% of populations holding digital assets, respectively), but high electricity costs and grid instability continue to limit their mining participation.

In South Asia, Indian industrial miners and select Pakistani operators using cheaper grid access sit near the viability threshold with current-generation hardware, but the margin is thin. India's 30% crypto tax and 1% tax deducted at source (TDS) regime, both unchanged as of mid-2026, continue to discourage formalised operations. Some observers have noted that framing Bitcoin mining infrastructure as AI-adjacent compute could provide political cover for more mining-friendly policy language in regional regulatory discussions, a dynamic directly relevant to the sector-wide AI pivot reshaping the industry.

Meanwhile, Bhutan cut its Bitcoin holdings by 70% in the first quarter of 2026, a signal that even state-level operators with advantaged energy access are reassessing risk at current prices.

One secondary opportunity worth watching: as US-listed miners retire older ASIC hardware to fund GPU buildouts, used equipment flows into secondary markets at steep discounts. Canaan's modular, immersion-cooled hash board modules deployed through its Tether partnership in South America offer a template for reducing capital barriers. The modular architecture's key advantage is that it decouples compute from power infrastructure and enclosure, cutting upfront costs in ways that matter most for operators in regions where capital and grid reliability are constrained. If similar arrangements extend to African or South Asian deployments, they could meaningfully lower entry costs for regional operators.

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Outlook

CoinShares projects the Bitcoin network hashrate could recover to 1.8 zettahashes per second by year-end 2026, which would require 800 to 1,000 EH/s of new capacity to come online. Whether that capacity materialises depends heavily on BTC price recovery and whether the sector's AI pivot accelerates or plateaus. Among the companies covered here, Bitdeer and CleanSpark have made the most aggressive moves toward AI and high-performance computing infrastructure, while BitFuFu and Canaan are deepening their Bitcoin-native operations. With sector-wide AI and high-performance computing contracts now exceeding $70 billion in announced value, the structural shift looks durable regardless of the next price cycle.