The Bitcoin network saw its 20 millionth BTC mined this week, leaving just 1 million coins left to be paid as rewards to miners.

The milestone has crypto industry observers taking stock of the rapidly changing Bitcoin mining industry, and weighing the economics of a shifting landscape against expectations of Bitcoin’s performance as an investment.

Mining companies help secure the Bitcoin network and verify transactions, expending large amounts of energy in a race to solve cryptographic puzzles in exchange for transaction fees and newly created Bitcoin as rewards. It’s taken miners 16 years to mine the 20 millionth coin from Bitcoin’s inception, but it could take roughly 115 years to unlock the remaining supply, according to Wolfie Zhao, the head of research at TheEnergyMag.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the Bitcoin mining industry will look the way it does for the next century. John Todaro, a managing director and senior research analyst at Needham & Company, expects many publicly traded miners to exit Bitcoin mining in 2027 and 2028.

“​​We believe a large portion of the public Bitcoin miners will sell down nearly all of their Bitcoin holdings before year-end 2026 as they embark on [capital expenditure] spend related to AI workloads,” he wrote in a recent note shared with Decrypt. In other words, Bitcoin mining companies are pivoting to AI.

All the publicly traded Bitcoin miners the firm covers have allocated a portion of their compute power to high-performance computing, or HPC, and AI. It’s a shift that’s been going on for years.

And it’s easy to see why, he added.

“Stubbornly low hash price combined with the upcoming 2028 halving presents a concerning environment for Bitcoin mining operations,” he told Decrypt. “Many operators are at or near breakeven costs today, while NOI margins in HPC are north of 80%.”

NOI refers to net operating income, which measures revenue minus operating expenses, excluding financing costs and taxes. So it stands to reason that mining firms are adjusting their revenue split to favor better margins.

Ross Gan, the chief communications officer at Bitdeer, told Decrypt the firm has Bitcoin’s technological infrastructure in its DNA.

Bitdeer, the Singapore-based miner led by Bitmain co-founder Jihan Wu, illustrates the fork in the road facing the industry. Wu helped industrialize Bitcoin mining in the first place—Bitmain, which he co-founded in 2013, once controlled roughly three-quarters of the global market for Bitcoin mining chips. Now Bitdeer is converting several of its facilities into AI data centers while simultaneously developing its own next-generation mining hardware.

“The miners that endure will be the ones that control more of the stack themselves. We demonstrate how that matters by designing and deploying our own high-efficiency ASICs and securing long-term energy capacity worldwide,” Gan said. “Vertical integration has proven to be one of the clearest markers of long-term survivability.”

He added that up until recently, Bitcoin has been treated as a key monetization engine that was complemented by AI infrastructure to keep long-term revenues stable.

“That duality may no longer be a nice-to-have in the future,” Gan said.

HIVE Digital Technologies, formerly HIVE Blockchain, was founded in 2017 and went public later that year on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The company began investing in high performance computing, or HPC, infrastructure much earlier than many of its competitors. So early, in fact, that it was still generating revenue from Ethereum mining when Executive Chairman Frank Holmes mentioned it on an earnings call.

“The Ethereum mining margins that we experienced during the quarter enabled us to continue the upgrade of our data center assets in Sweden and Iceland and also diversify our business by starting to invest in HPC assets,” he said in November 2021.

It wasn’t until a year later that Ethereum developers executed the merge, changing the network from a proof-of-work to proof-of-stake consensus mechanism and rendering Ethereum mining obsolete.

The Canadian company has built its business around finding creative ways to source power from hydro-electric and otherwise stranded energy, Holmes told Decrypt.

“Bitcoin miners have led the world in sourcing stranded and surplus energy and in building Tier I power infrastructure at scale,” he said. “There is enormous energy abundance in the world, especially in hydro-rich regions like South America and Canada, but the winners will be operators that can secure it at low cost, structure around it intelligently, and turn that energy into durable computing infrastructure.”

Even as analysts, like Todaro, predict that some Bitcoin mining firms will begin winding down by the end of 2027, Holmes sees the squeeze ahead of the next halving event—forecast for mid-2028—as a challenge to get even more efficient.

“Block rewards will decrease, but that does not mean the industry will disappear. It means the bar rises,” he added. “The miners that survive will be the ones with the best power, the best sites, and the most flexibility.”

But what happens to the price of Bitcoin when block rewards get all the way to zero? Investors have known that Bitcoin has a finite supply since its inception, so theoretically it’s priced in.

The most apt comparison comes from the Bitcoin whitepaper itself: “The steady addition of a [constant amount] of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation,” pseudonymous BTC creator Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in 2008. The comparison has been adopted widely by Bitcoin fans, including BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Strategy founder Michael Saylor, and even Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

The global gold supply hasn’t been exhausted yet, so investors can’t skip ahead a few chapters for a preview of what BTC might do in 115 years. But Todaro pointed out that the very gradual reduction in block rewards should dampen effects on Bitcoin’s price.

He expects the majority of selling pressure to come from newly produced BTC, not long-time HODLers. And even if Bitcoin miners liquidate their holdings as they exit the business, they’re not the whales they used to be.

“Bitcoin miners do not hold as much Bitcoin on their balance sheets on a relative basis as they historically have,” he said. “They hold ~0.5% of the circulating supply, while Strategy alone holds 7x more BTC than all the miners combined.”