Core Scientific Is Selling Nearly All Its Bitcoin to Fund an AI Infrastructure Buildout

Core Scientific announced it will sell substantially all of its approximately 2,537 BTC in reserves throughout 2026, with 1,900 BTC already sold in January generating $175 million, as the company redirects capital toward a 1.5 gigawatt AI data center portfolio targeting $10 billion in contracted revenue.

The Numbers

Core Scientific ended 2025 with 2,537 BTC. By January’s end, the company had already sold approximately 1,900 of those coins for roughly $175 million, an average price of approximately $92,000 per coin. The current balance is fewer than 1,000 BTC, estimated at around 630.

The plan is to complete the liquidation during Q1 2026 and continue periodic sales of what remains. When this is done, Core Scientific will be functionally out of the Bitcoin treasury business entirely.

For context, this is the opposite direction from Strategy, which added 3,015 BTC the same week Core Scientific was emptying its reserves. Both companies are among the more prominent corporate Bitcoin holders. One is accumulating at every dip. The other is selling everything to buy GPU clusters. The divergence in corporate Bitcoin strategy has probably never been more visible than it is right now.

Why They’re Selling

Traditional Bitcoin mining revenue fell 40% year over year for Core Scientific. The company posted a loss of $0.42 per share in Q4 2025. The halving reduced block rewards, the global hash rate kept climbing, and Bitcoin’s price decline from $126,000 squeezed margins from multiple directions simultaneously.

MARA Holdings Just Ended Its HODL Policy –  53,822 BTC Can Now Be Sold

Against that backdrop, the company has $10 billion in contracted revenue sitting on the other side of a capital deployment decision. The CoreWeave colocation agreement is the anchor of that pipeline, a high-density computing deal that requires converting mining sites into AI-ready infrastructure. Every megawatt Core Scientific redirects from Bitcoin mining to AI workloads moves the company further from a revenue stream that’s declining and closer to one that’s expanding.

The Bitcoin treasury was never the core of Core Scientific’s business the way it is for Strategy. It was a byproduct of mining operations. Liquidating it to fund a transformation that has $10 billion in contracted demand on the other side is not a difficult decision to explain.

The 1.5 Gigawatt Target

Core Scientific is targeting 1.5 gigawatts of leasable power capacity by 2028 with every megawatt eventually dedicated to AI workloads. That scale puts it in the same category as the large data center operators that hyperscalers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are competing to lock up capacity from.

Riot Platforms is building toward a similar position, covered earlier this week, with its AMD partnership and Corsicana construction plans. MARA Holdings updated its treasury policy to allow Bitcoin sales partly to fund AI infrastructure acquisitions. The pattern across major Bitcoin miners in early 2026 is consistent: the companies with valuable power assets are pivoting those assets toward AI, and they’re funding the pivot by liquidating or pledging their Bitcoin.

The difference is the pace. Core Scientific is selling everything now. MARA updated its policy to allow sales when needed. Riot is using equity issuance rather than Bitcoin sales. Three companies, three different treasury approaches to the same strategic destination.

What 1,900 BTC Hitting the Market in January Meant

Core Scientific selling 1,900 BTC in January 2026 at an average near $92,000 is a supply input into the market during a period when price was already declining from October highs. It’s not large enough to be the primary driver of any particular price move, but it represents the kind of motivated institutional selling that compounds pressure from other sources.

January 2026 was Bitcoin’s worst month in the current losing streak at negative 10.1%. How much of that pressure came from miners liquidating into AI pivots versus macro de-risking and ETF outflows is impossible to isolate. But the timing and scale of Core Scientific’s January sales are part of the supply picture for that month.

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