JPMorgan estimates the average global cost to mine one bitcoin at approximately $78,000. Bitcoin was trading near $64,200 at the time of publication, continuing a slide that has erased roughly 38% of its value over the past year. The bank's analysts have tracked the sector closely through 2026, with Reginald Smith and Charles Pearce authoring the firm's mining coverage earlier in the year, though their authorship of the June 2026 report specifically could not be independently confirmed, as the full document remains behind a paywall.

The June report, as reported by The Block, represents what analysts describe as an explicit acknowledgment that conditions for the industry have reversed course after a brief recovery period at the start of 2026.

A Recovery That Didn't Hold

Earlier this year, mining economics had shown signs of improvement. JPMorgan's January 2026 report noted that gross mining margins had climbed roughly 300 basis points to around 47%, with the sector's combined market capitalization gaining $13 billion in the first two weeks of the year. By February, the bank had revised its production cost estimate down to $70,000 from roughly $90,000 at the start of the year, as network hashrate and difficulty eased.

That relief has since evaporated. Bitcoin has fallen approximately 16.8% in the past month alone, dropping from around $77,169 to current levels. Network hashrate, a measure of total computing power devoted to mining, has declined from a peak of roughly 1,160 exahashes per second (EH/s) in October 2025 to between 830 and 918 EH/s in June 2026, a drop of 20 to 30%. Hashprice, the revenue miners earn per unit of computing power deployed, has collapsed approximately 66% from the October 2025 peak.

The network's automatic difficulty adjustment partially cushioned the blow. On June 13, 2026, mining difficulty dropped 9.21%, falling from roughly 138.96 trillion to approximately 125.94 trillion. Difficulty adjustments mean each unit of hashrate earns a slightly larger share of block rewards when fewer miners compete, but as BT-Miners noted in its June 2026 analysis, the relief was marginal given how far prices have fallen.

Hardware and Electricity Costs Define Survival

Electricity accounts for 60 to 80% of total mining expenses, making power rates the primary factor separating profitable operations from those running at a loss. CoinShares noted in its Q1 2026 mining report that hashprices had reached their lowest post-halving levels on record, at $28 to $30 per petahash per second per day. At those levels, the firm wrote, "miners running mid-generation hardware need access to sub-5c/kWh power to remain cash-profitable."

The most efficient mining hardware currently available, such as the Antminer S21 XP, operates at roughly 13.5 joules per terahash. Machines from 2017-era generations consume closer to 98 joules per terahash, making them effectively unprofitable in most electricity markets at current bitcoin prices.

CoinShares calculated that the weighted average cash cost across publicly listed miners in Q4 2025 was approximately $79,995 per bitcoin, closely matching JPMorgan's current estimate. Individual operators varied significantly. CleanSpark reported costs near $52,463 per bitcoin, meaning it remains profitable at current prices, while HIVE posted the highest among tracked peers at around $65,368, a figure that exceeds the current spot price of approximately $64,200 and places HIVE, on this metric, already operating at a loss.

Regional Fault Lines

The report's implications land differently depending on where mining operations are located.

In Africa, Ethiopia stands out as a relative shelter, though the picture varies considerably across the continent. With electricity rates from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam ranging between roughly $0.032 and $0.053 per kilowatt-hour, operations running modern hardware can theoretically produce bitcoin below current market prices. A Chinese firm is currently developing a 51-megawatt facility in the country, signaling continued institutional interest in Africa's energy cost advantage. Gridless Compute, which operates across Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia using stranded renewable energy sources including hydro, geothermal, and biomass mini-grids, benefits from structural cost advantages that many North American operators do not share. For small-scale and artisanal miners elsewhere on the continent running older hardware or paying higher commercial electricity rates, however, conditions are considerably bleaker. Nigeria has also emerged with competitive fixed-rate electricity contracts as low as $0.0364 per kilowatt-hour over seven-year terms, demonstrating that Ethiopia is not the only African jurisdiction with favorable economics. Even Ethiopia's advantage carries a forward-looking caveat: proposed electricity tariff increases could reshape the country's mining industry by 2027, directly qualifying its current status as a low-cost haven.

Pakistan faces a starkly different situation. The government announced in May 2025 a plan to redirect 2,000 megawatts of surplus power toward bitcoin mining and AI data centers. Commercial electricity in Pakistan runs around $0.22 per kilowatt-hour, making unsubsidized mining economically irrational at any current price. A proposed subsidized rate of $0.09 per kilowatt-hour, which would bring production costs to roughly $54,000 per bitcoin using modern hardware, was rejected by the International Monetary Fund over concerns about market distortion and energy policy reform. Even at that subsidized rate, the margin against current spot prices would be thin. Without the subsidy, Pakistan's national mining initiative now looks financially untenable unless bitcoin prices recover significantly.

India, elsewhere in South Asia, does not currently operate large-scale public mining infrastructure, though interest in the sector has grown. High commercial electricity costs across most of the subcontinent make institutional mining difficult without access to stranded or renewable power at preferential rates.

What Comes Next

The April 2024 halving, which cut per-block bitcoin issuance from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC, has compressed the revenue baseline for all miners. Approximately 450 BTC are minted daily across roughly 144 blocks under the current reward schedule. The next halving, expected around 2028, will cut the per-block reward further to 1.5625 BTC. Transaction fees, which will eventually need to replace block subsidies as the primary revenue source, remain insufficient to compensate at scale.

A parallel shift is accelerating across the publicly listed sector. More than $70 billion in AI and high-performance computing infrastructure contracts have been announced by mining firms, including Marathon and Core Scientific. This pivot is part of why global hashrate has declined even as the network itself remains operational. A related structural concern is the growing concentration of mining activity in the United States, which accounted for approximately 41% of global hashrate (around 419 EH/s) as of January 2026, a record share that raises questions about network decentralization as the industry consolidates. Whether strategic diversification into AI and high-performance computing buffers listed miners from the current price environment will likely depend on how long bitcoin remains below the cost of production, and on whether a meaningful price recovery restores margins before the 2028 halving compresses the revenue baseline further still.