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CoinShares reports that Bitcoin's network hashrate has fallen roughly 50% below its long-term growth trend, marking the first sustained six-month decline since China's 2021 mining crackdown. The firm links the slowdown to miners redirecting resources and infrastructure toward AI computing workloads rather than Bitcoin mining.
A Reddit user on r/pcmasterrace posted photos of two abandoned crypto mining rigs found in a basement, containing a dozen Zotac RTX 3070 graphics cards along with DDR4 memory, SSDs, power supplies and MSI Z390 motherboards. The rigs had been used for Ethereum mining during the pandemic and sat unused after home mining stopped being profitable, with the owner giving them away once asked.
Mexican federal police, Navy and state forces raided a hidden cryptocurrency mining site in Tlaola, Puebla, seizing roughly 300 GPUs, 80 medium-voltage terminations, a transformer and eight satellite antennas. Investigators believe the operation was illegally drawing power from the nearby Necaxa hydroelectric dam, and it marks the fourth such facility uncovered in the region since early last year.
A Reddit user acquired two old cryptocurrency mining rigs left in a basement, containing a total of 12 Zotac RTX 3070 graphics cards along with an MSI motherboard, a 1000W power supply, RAM and SSDs. Despite years of storage, the hardware showed only minor wear, including some silicone bleeding from aging thermal pads, but appeared largely salvageable.
Following an August incident where a burst water line at an Athlon BT-operated Bitcoin-mining facility in El Reno, Oklahoma spilled nearly four million gallons of water, a subsequent fire marshal inspection uncovered a string of serious safety violations. Investigators found flammable liquids stored near combustible materials, poorly maintained fire extinguishers, damaged electrical wiring, an empty emergency lockbox, and code-violating vegetation, prompting the city to issue the facility a failing safety grade.
A Bitcoin mining data center in El Reno, Oklahoma, owned by Athlon Blockchain LLC, has been condemned after leaking roughly 3 million gallons of water, prompting closures of schools, businesses, and city and county offices. The facility had reportedly continued construction and operations despite a 2023 city Stop Work Order tied to fire and safety code violations and expired permits.
The AMD BC-250 is a leftover PlayStation 5 APU that failed console binning standards and was instead sold on mining server boards built by ASRock. With mainstream GPU mining now unprofitable, these boards have flooded the secondhand market for roughly $70-$100, giving hobbyists a full single-board PC with 6 Zen 2 cores, 24 RDNA 2 compute units, and 16GB of shared GDDR6 memory.
Caterpillar is extending the autonomous systems expertise it built in mining—covering haul trucks, drilling and remote operations—into construction sites, quarries and internal tools. CTO Jaime Mineart said the company's Cat AI Assistant now lets field technicians use voice commands to retrieve repair procedures and identify parts, drawing on data from roughly 1.6 million connected machines and over 16 petabytes of structured data.
A new tool called SubSmith lets users transform their own video files into language-learning content by generating and working with subtitles for immersion-based study. It's aimed at learners who prefer building study material from local files like downloaded shows, podcasts, or MKV files rather than relying solely on streaming platforms. The launch is accompanied by guides, including timeline estimators for Japanese and Spanish learners and instructions for sentence mining from local media.
A mining-engineering professor in China describes being repeatedly denied underground access for research, despite designing systems meant to operate in those very environments. She notes that laws such as China's 2012 labor-protection statute, along with similar rules in dozens of countries, prohibit women from underground mine work without distinguishing between routine labor shifts and brief, supervised technical visits.
Seattle-based Interlune is developing technology to extract helium-3, a rare isotope embedded in lunar soil by billions of years of solar wind bombardment, with the goal of eventually mining it from the Moon and returning it to Earth. The company has been working on methods to simulate and accelerate the natural process that deposits helium-3 into lunar regolith, testing extraction techniques ahead of any full-scale mining mission.
Companies that built vast data centers of specialized computers to mine Bitcoin are redirecting that infrastructure toward AI workloads. The shift follows a decline in Bitcoin's value since its October 2025 peak, which has squeezed mining profits. Several of these firms are now striking deals with AI companies like Anthropic, which need massive computing capacity for their models.