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News · Nov 7, 2026 · 4 min read

Listed miners fell up to 20% on AI and Texas worries; a coin still costs about $19,500 to make

Bernstein cut price targets on seven listed bitcoin miners by 35% to 54% after Democrats won Texas, and the shares fell as much as 20% on Thursday. The cause is AI data-centre plans, not bitcoin: the network those companies mine grew through October.

Firsthand card: "Listed miners fell up to 20% on AI and Texas worries; a coin still costs about $19,500 to make", showing $19,487 as the cost of electricity for one bitcoin

Bernstein cut seven miners' price targets by 35% to 54% after Texas voted

On 4 November Bernstein cut its price targets on seven listed bitcoin miners by roughly 35% to 54%, CoinDesk reported. Cipher Mining went from $23 to $15, IREN from $100 to $55, TeraWulf from $36 to $20, Core Scientific from $32 to $19, Riot Platforms from $35 to $18, MARA Holdings from $17 to $10 and CleanSpark from $24 to $11.

The reason was Texas, not bitcoin. Democrat Gina Hinojosa upset Governor Greg Abbott in Tuesday's midterms, and she wants to halt new data-centre approvals until Texas has rules protecting residents from higher electricity and water costs. Bernstein also cited tighter financing conditions, and now values the companies' AI colocation businesses at 12 times forward EBITDA.

Shares fell as much as 20% on Thursday

Bitcoin Magazine reported listed miners down as much as 20% on Thursday 5 November, in a Nasdaq-led selloff. CleanSpark, Cipher and TeraWulf each lost more than 12%, and Keel Infrastructure fell about 20% after selling its entire bitcoin holding for $192 million.

The month had already been hard on them. VanEck said shares of miners that pivoted to AI infrastructure fell an average of 35% in October, and called the move a dislocation from fundamentals, because the power these companies control is the binding constraint on AI computing. Contagion from GPU rental companies, a hotter September inflation reading and election uncertainty were its causes.

These companies now earn most of their money from AI leases

TeraWulf's third-quarter results, filed with the SEC on 6 November, show the change. Total revenue was $76.2 million, of which $63.0 million, 83%, was leasing capacity for high-performance computing. Digital asset revenue was $13.2 million, against $43.4 million a year earlier.

The filing says the company operates bitcoin-mining infrastructure at Lake Mariner, "portions of which are being repurposed to support contracted HPC development". It also describes a 20-year lease with Anthropic for about 401 MW of capacity, worth about $19 billion over the initial term. The Block covered the same results. A listed miner with this mix is priced on its data-centre pipeline, so a Texas election moves it.

TeraWulf's bitcoin revenue fell from $43.4 million to $13.2 million in a year. Its AI lease revenue rose from $7.2 million to $63.0 million.

The network those miners work on kept growing

Bitcoin's own numbers did not move with the shares. The network's hashrate averaged 1,037 exahash a second from 31 October to 6 November, up 7% on the 966 EH/s average of 24 to 30 September. Readings of hashrate are noisy, so these are weekly averages.

Hashprice, what a petahash earns in a day, was $32.48 on 6 November, against $39.95 on 1 October. Two things moved it: a petahash earned 0.000427 bitcoin a day on 6 November, against 0.000478 on 1 October, 11% fewer coins as difficulty rose, while bitcoin's price went from $83,571 to $75,989. Both are on our hashprice chart; the guide to hashprice explains the figure.

Chart: Network hashrate since August, with the weekly average the readings are judged on. It was higher in the first week of November than in the last week of September, while miners' shares fell. Open the chart

Making a coin costs the same whichever way the shares go

On the most efficient machine in stock, the Antminer S23 XP Hyd, at the cheapest site that can run it, Nigeria at 3.9 cents a kilowatt-hour, electricity for one bitcoin costs about $19,500 today, against a market price of $76,016 on 7 November. That is about a quarter of the price, and no election in Texas changes it.

A share in a listed miner is now partly a bet on AI data-centre approvals, and Bernstein's own note expects the approvals pause to continue. A machine you own mines bitcoin and nothing else. Its earnings follow hashprice and the power rate, and the coins it mines stay in your wallet.

Chart: Hashprice in dollars per petahash per day since August. The fall since early October is mostly the bitcoin price and the rise in difficulty; nothing in it comes from the Texas result. Open the chart

What it means for a miner

The story of 4 and 5 November is about listed companies choosing between bitcoin and AI, and the market repricing the AI half. For an owner of hosted machines the questions are the usual ones: what a petahash earns, what the power costs, and how many coins that leaves in the wallet. On the best machine at the cheapest site, the answer sat at about a quarter of the market price this week.

Output is never guaranteed, hashprice moves daily, and this is not a price call.

Sources and further reading

Disclosure

Firsthand Bitcoin sells and hosts mining hardware, including this machine. No manufacturer, distributor or affiliate programme paid for or reviewed this page and we take no commission on the links above. Historical figures are computed from daily bitcoin price and network hashprice, each day valued at its own prices. Nothing here is investment advice.