June 2026 proved to be a challenging month for public mining companies. CleanSpark, BitFuFu, and Canaan simultaneously recorded a decline in Bitcoin mining volumes, despite network difficulty dropping to levels not seen since 2026. This suggests that operational issues and business model restructuring are having a stronger impact than the favorable network hashrate environment.
CleanSpark, traditionally considered one of the most efficient miners, reduced production from 671 BTC in May to 614 BTC in June. The key factor was a drop in average operational hashrate from 46 EH/s to 43 EH/s. Meanwhile, the company still holds a solid reserve of 13,924 BTC on its balance sheet. BitFuFu showed a sharper decline: mining output fell from 177 to 125 BTC. The reason was a reduction in leased capacity, leading to a drop in total computing power from 19.5 to 15 EH/s. Interestingly, the company continues to expand its own fleet: 1,200 S21 XP miners were deployed in June, and another 2,000 devices are expected to be connected in July. Canaan, meanwhile, mined only 64 BTC compared to 90 BTC the previous month, attributing the decline to planned power grid maintenance at one of its sites. However, their Texas joint venture recovered from May's fires, and the balance sheet grew by 49 BTC, reaching record levels of 1,915 BTC and 3,952 ETH.
The market reacted to the reports in mixed ways. CleanSpark shares rose 5% to $13, BitFuFu shares increased 7% to $1.42, while Canaan lost 1.5%, dropping to $0.2. This reflects varying degrees of investor confidence in the companies' strategies.
However, the main news concerns not so much June's mining output, but CleanSpark's strategic pivot. On July 14, the company signed a 20-year lease agreement for a data center campus in Georgia with an unnamed investment-grade technology company. The contract is valued at $6.6 billion, and with extension options, could reach $11.6 billion. The tenant will deploy 175 MW of infrastructure, with commissioning scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2027.
CleanSpark CEO Matt Schultz directly stated that this agreement marks the company's transition from pure Bitcoin mining to a diversified digital infrastructure model. In parallel, the parties signed an agreement for exclusive negotiations covering CleanSpark's entire Texas portfolio, including two sites with potential capacity of up to 885 MW. The contract is expected to generate approximately $330 million in net operating income annually, with nearly 100% operating margins. It is worth recalling that CleanSpark began its pivot toward AI infrastructure back in the fall of 2025, and now we are seeing the first real fruits of this strategy.
My analysis: The current decline in mining output for these three companies is a temporary phenomenon, caused either by technical issues or a deliberate business restructuring. CleanSpark shows that the future of mining giants lies not in simply increasing hashrate, but in monetizing energy assets through contracts with the AI sector. This could become the new norm for the industry, where traditional mining will be just one of several areas in the portfolio of diversified digital energy companies.