Bitcoin dropped below $90,000 on Monday for the first time since April, touching an intraday low of $89,426 before closing near $91,200. The decline marked a more-than 20% retreat from the cryptocurrency’s October peak above $126,000 and has erased all of its gains for 2025.

While broader market factors — including $2.3 billion of outflows from U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs in the first half of November and rising Treasury yields — have contributed to the sell-off, an important supply-side pressure has come from Bitcoin miners themselves. Higher electricity costs, driven in part by the rapid growth of artificial-intelligence data centers, are squeezing mining profitability and prompting operators to liquidate holdings.

Electricity accounts for 70-80% of the cost of mining Bitcoin. The April 2024 halving cut the block reward to 3.125 BTC, and even with prices above $100,000 earlier this year, many operators were already running on narrow margins. Since then, wholesale power prices in key mining regions have continued to climb. In ERCOT (Texas), the largest U.S. mining hub, average wholesale prices rose 18% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2025, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. In Northern Virginia, home to both large mining operations and hyperscale cloud regions, prices jumped 13% over the same period, data from grid operator PJM show.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration now expects national wholesale power prices to increase another 8.5% in 2026, to $51 per megawatt-hour, citing demand from data centers as a primary driver. AI training and inference workloads are projected to push U.S. data-center power consumption from roughly 200 terawatt-hours in 2024 to more than 400 TWh by 2030.

On-chain analytics firms report that miners moved approximately 71,000 BTC to exchanges in the first two weeks of November alone, with another 210,000 BTC transferred in October — among the highest monthly totals since the 2022 bear market.

Several large publicly traded miners have openly acknowledged the shift. Marathon Digital sold portions of its October and November production to cover operating expenses, while Core Scientific and Iris Energy have signed multi-year contracts to host AI workloads at premiums of 3-4 times the revenue they earn per kilowatt-hour from Bitcoin mining. Bitfarms announced in September that it intends to fully exit crypto mining by 2027 and convert its entire 341-megawatt portfolio to high-performance computing.

The pivot is financially rational: AI hosting contracts typically deliver 70-80% EBITDA margins and multi-year revenue visibility, compared with the volatility of Bitcoin mining. Yet the consequence for the Bitcoin market is straightforward — more coins are hitting exchanges at a time when retail and institutional demand has cooled.