Bitcoin miners are struggling to maintain their monthly production as the mining difficulty-measured by the computational power required to validate BTC transactions and generate new blocks-continues to increase.

Many leading Bitcoin miners have reported a drop in their BTC production in January 2025 compared to December 2024. In contrast, Riot Platforms recorded a 2.1% increase in Bitcoin output, bucking the trend.

Bitcoin difficulty hovering at its all-time high

Throughout January, the difficulty of Bitcoin network has been hovering around its all time high of 110 trillion.

The mining difficulty has climbed a whopping 27.8% since the end of April 2024. While Bitcoin miners did take prudent precautions such as increasing the computing power and streamlining business operations to remain profitable, January production seems to reflect that their efforts came a little short of their expectation.

In January, Hut 8’s Bitcoin production fell 27% month-over-month, with only 65 BTC mined in January, while Marathon Digital and Bitfarms saw a decline of 12.5% and 4.7%, respectively, in their monthly output.

Riot Platforms leveraging on AI for its mining operations

Unlike the many other mining companies that depended on increasing their computing power and lowering costs to weather the storm, Riot Platforms moved towards AI and high-power computing to diversify their operations.

The manifestation of this initiative was a new mining facility in Texas, where the company is launching a testing phase of using artificial intelligence and high-power computing applications.

Jason Les, CEO of Riot, stated:

“The Corsicana Facility reached a deployed hash rate of 15.7 EH/s towards the end of the month. We also continue to see strong results from newly deployed miners and immersion systems, reflected in the significant improvement in our operational hash rate and utilization rates.”

Bitcoin miners can expect Bitcoin mining hashrate to decline in the later parts of February due to a reduction of mining difficulty and fewer preorders for mining hardware.

By the last week of January, mining difficulty had dropped slightly to 108T, while the Bitcoin network maintained an estimated hashrate of 832 exahashes per second (EH/s).