After personally touring the Las Vegas Bitcoin 2026 Conference, what I felt was really remarkable. They say more than 40,000 people attended, and online viewers exceeded 1 million. On stage, Michael Saylor passionately shouted that Bitcoin would reach $10 million, and Arthur Hayes said his year-end target was $125,000. Even Trump’s second son showed up and said he was confident it would hit $1 million. The atmosphere was definitely intense. But the problem was the exhibition hall.

According to the exhibitors, the actual number of visitors dropped by more than 30% compared to last year. At the booths, there were more staff than customers, and attendance at the lecture areas was only about one-fifth. The sponsor list was also interesting: some of last year’s major mining machine manufacturers were gone, replaced by data center and AI infrastructure companies. They kept shouting about bright prospects for Bitcoin, but in reality, capital and attention were flowing elsewhere.

The moves made by mining companies make this even clearer. In this year’s first quarter, the average cash cost per Bitcoin for publicly listed mining companies rose to about $80,000. The hash rate price fell to the lowest level ever. This means mining is no longer a profitable business. That’s why big-name mining firms started making moves. Bitdeer sold all 943 of the Bitcoin it held, raised $300 million, and poured it all into AI. Marathon sold more than 10,000 Bitcoins, cashed out $1.1 billion, and shifted to AI data centers. CleanSpark was the same. What they found was a simple truth: if you host AI using the same amount of power, the profit is 2.5 times higher than mining.

The industry insiders I met on-site were even more cold-blooded. “Who would try to make money solely by mining? These days, it’s better to lease land and power grids to AI companies and act as a tenant,” they said. It’s predicted that by the end of this year, the share of AI business revenue for publicly listed mining companies will surge from 30% to 70%. The people talking about Bitcoin’s prospects were on stage—but the actual direction of money was already heading to AI.

What was interesting was the modular data centers from Chinese companies. Well-known Twitter influencer Bruce J tweeted, “This year’s Las Vegas conference was really disappointing, and the only thing that stood out was the modular AI data centers from Chinese companies.” The reason was speed. Traditional AI data centers in the U.S. take 3 to 5 years, but modular solutions from China’s supply chain can be ready in only a few months. For North American big firms, time is a competitive advantage. The game will be decided by who gets their GPUs running first. That’s why executives from American mining companies gathered in front of the booths of Chinese firms.

However, not everyone was rushing into AI. Companies like BitFuFu were still sticking to mining. The booth representative said that although current market sentiment was negative, they remained optimistic about Bitcoin. The logic was that the more severe the mining difficulty becomes, the more opportunities there are to secure good mining resources cheaply. They said their business model—combining self-mining with cloud computing—was relatively resilient and stable. They believed that if institutional capital keeps flowing in, Bitcoin’s outlook will become even more solid.

On one side of the exhibition hall, American parents walked around with their children, checking out Satoshi Nakamoto’s installation art and even touching mining rigs. People took photos in front of Bitcoin Magazine covers. Bitcoin was still a mental symbol for many people. But mining companies with massive computing power were moving not based on belief, but on profit. No matter what the outlook for Bitcoin was, the flow of capital had already been decided. In the end, only true believers remained.