AI GPUs Earn 10x More per Hour Than Mining Rigs

The Math Behind the 10x Claim

Holmes laid out the comparison during the Roundtable 100 series earlier this week, arguing that HIVE’s pivot into artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure has opened a revenue stream that dwarfs what the same hardware could earn mining bitcoin. A 504-GPU Nvidia B200 cluster HIVE runs at Bell Canada’s AI fabric in Manitoba earns roughly $2.90 per GPU-hour, compared with the roughly $0.12 per hour HIVE’s bitcoin mining rigs generate, a gap of more than 20 times by that specific measure.

The comparison is central to how Holmes has put forth HIVE’s strategy heading into the latter half of the year, i.e. rather than treating AI compute and bitcoin mining as competing uses of the same power and hardware, the company is directing more of its infrastructure spend toward the higher-margin business while keeping its mining operation running.

That mining operation is still substantial, given HIVE’s average hashrate for fiscal 2026 came in at 22.2 exahashes per second (EH/s), up 290% from a year earlier, giving the company roughly 3% of the entire bitcoin network’s hashrate. The company mined 2,885 BTC during the same period, more than double the 1,414 BTC it mined in fiscal 2025.

A Diversified Balance Sheet

HIVE’s total fiscal 2026 revenue reached $297.8 million, a 158% increase year over year, with digital currency revenue from bitcoin mining up 164%. The company’s newer BUZZ HPC division, which houses its AI and high-performance computing (HPC) business, generated $19.5 million in revenue, up 94% from $10 million the prior year.

The AI pivot is not new for HIVE given that the company made a $70 million bet on Nvidia chips roughly three years ago, at a time when most of its GPU fleet was mining ether before that network’s move to proof-of-stake eliminated GPU mining altogether. Holmes has said that early wager, initially postured around Ethereum mining, gave his company a head start when the AI computing boom created fresh demand for the same hardware.

That infrastructure has since attracted outside validation. Chardan Capital, for instance, initiated coverage of HIVE on July 27 with a “Buy” rating and a $7.50 price target, the company’s first-ever sell-side analyst rating. HIVE has also signed a roughly $220 million GPU cloud agreement with Bell and AI firm Cohere, and raised $75 million through a note offering earmarked for further AI infrastructure buildout.

The Bigger Bet: A 320 MW AI Hub

HIVE’s most ambitious project is a 320-megawatt (MW) AI data center under construction in the Greater Toronto Area, designed to eventually host more than 100,000 GPUs. The company has said the facility could generate roughly $360 million in annualized recurring revenue once fully online in the second half of 2027.

That said, HIVE is far from alone in making this pivot, as rival miner MARA too has said that AI compute earns more revenue per unit of electricity than bitcoin mining, directing scarce power toward AI and HPC contracts instead. Similarly, Hut 8 has struck a Texas AI lease worth roughly $9.8 billion, while Terawulf has locked in AI contracts worth $12.8 billion, part of a broader shift across publicly traded miners as bitcoin mining margins tighten and hashprice slides.

That margin pressure has been building all year on the mining side of the business since Bitcoin’s difficulty has adjusted 15 times this year alone, with mining economics squeezed further as more megawatts get redirected toward AI and cloud-computing customers instead of new mining capacity.

HIVE’s near-term target is to grow its AI and HPC run-rate revenue tenfold from current levels by its fiscal year-end, a goal that would require the Toronto facility and further GPU cloud contracts to come online largely on schedule.