U.S. Share of Bitcoin Hashrate Slips Below 35% as Emerging-Market Capacity Grows

The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance on Monday published its Q1 2026 Bitcoin Mining Map, the most-cited source of country-level hashrate distribution data. The headline finding: the United States's share of global hashrate has slipped to 34.1%, down from a peak of 42% in late 2024. The U.S. remains the largest single-country hashrate host by a substantial margin. The trajectory, however, has reversed.

The specific country figures

The Q1 2026 distribution:

• United States: 34.1%
• Russia: 11.8%
• China (unofficial, estimated): 9.4%
• Paraguay: 6.2%
• Ethiopia: 5.9%
• Oman: 4.7%
• Canada: 4.5%
• Kazakhstan: 3.8%
• United Arab Emirates: 3.2%
• Rest of world: 16.4%

The most notable feature of the table is the rise of Paraguay and Ethiopia, neither of which was in the top ten 18 months ago. Both are now well-established in the top seven, and both are growing faster than the global average.

What is driving the U.S. share decline

The U.S. share decline is not being driven by U.S. capacity leaving the country — U.S. hashrate in absolute terms is still growing, just more slowly than the global total. The dynamics are:

• Permitting delays: large-scale U.S. site permits now take 14-22 months, up from 8-12 months in 2022
• Power market prices: Texas's ERCOT and other U.S. grids have repriced power costs upward as data center demand generally has exploded
• Cost of capital: U.S. miners' cost of capital has risen as the public market has soured on pure-play mining equities

"The U.S. is not losing mining. The U.S. is losing the marginal new site to jurisdictions that can permit faster and charge less for power." — Nicolas Vera, an independent mining analyst

The political framing

The declining U.S. share has become a talking point for the industry's regulatory advocacy. The argument is straightforward: U.S. policy choices are making American mining less competitive, and the resulting relocation to jurisdictions with less friendly posture toward American interests is a national-security concern. The argument has an obvious self-interest component, but the factual premise — that U.S. share is declining while geopolitically ambiguous jurisdictions are gaining — is accurate.

Whether the argument moves U.S. policy is unclear. The Trump administration's stated preference, through its executive order on strategic Bitcoin stockpiling and related policies, has been to support U.S. mining. The implementation has been inconsistent, with power market and permitting policies that partially undercut the stated preference.

The bigger picture

The global hashrate rebalancing is a meaningful shift, but it is not, yet, a dramatic one. No country is losing share at the rate China did in 2021. No country is gaining at the rate the U.S. did in 2022. The distribution is broadening — which is, from a network-security perspective, a positive — but the pace is manageable and the top-ten concentration remains substantial.

The direction the next 18 months goes depends heavily on three factors: U.S. permitting policy, EU member state positions (with Sweden's vote next week being the most immediate datapoint), and whether Ethiopia and Paraguay can sustain their growth rates or whether they will encounter the same political backlash that has affected other jurisdictions at comparable points in their trajectory. The Cambridge data will tell us in Q2.