Cango sells 2,000 BTC in ‘strategic deleveraging’ as Bitcoin miners pivot to AI

Publicly traded Bitcoin mining firm Cango (NYSE: CANG) has joined the list of major players using their BTC holdings to manage debt and pivot to AI investments.  On Wednesday, the firm announced that it sold 2000 BTC in March, calling it a "strategic de-leveraging" to retire its BTC-backed loans.  The firm added that it raised $75 million and that some of the proceeds from the "strategic de-leveraging" will help drive its diversification.  This de-leveraging, combined with recent capital infusions, strengthens Cango's balance sheet to support its planned transition into energy and AI infrastructure. Bitcoin hashrate drops as Cango, other miners pivot to AI Now, the firm holds 1,025.69 BTC. Interestingly, Cango said that its aggressive lean operations have helped reduce its BTC production costs by 19% in Q1. For perspective, in Q4 2025, its cost of production for 1 unit of BTC was $84.5K. By March 2026, this dropped to $68.2K.  While this is a great improvement, the miner would still be in distress if BTC's price falls below $68K. In such a scenario, it could be forced to liquidate more of its BTC holdings to stay afloat.  From this backdrop, the growing trend of public miners rushing to AI infrastructure ventures to maximize their compute power for extra revenues makes sense.  Cango now joins the growing list of public miners pivoting to AI, including MARA, Bit Digital, Core Scientific, IREN, Bitfarms, TerraWulf, and Cipher Mining.  With some dedicating part of their BTC energy and computing power to AI, BTC’s global hashrate has declined too. In fact, according to Glassnode, the global hashrate declined from a record high of 1.115 Zetahash/s to 950 Exahashes/s - A 17.4% fall in BTC overall computational power.  The dropping hashrate is an opportunity and risk at the same time. The decreasing hashrate and AI pivots imply that the overall Bitcoin network security has been lowered and could expose it to attacks if the trend continues.  On the other hand, it offers small and medium miners a rare chance to step into the void left by public miners diversifying into AI. As the hashrate drops, network difficulty and overall costs of production fall too, allowing the remaining BTC miners to enjoy higher margins.  Final Summary Cango dumped 2000 BTC to cover debt obligations and doubled down on its AI shift after raising an extra $75M. Ongoing public miners' pivot to AI has partly driven the 17% drop in global Bitcoin hashrate.