With China out of the picture after banning crypto mining and trading in the country, North American miners are scrambling for a bigger piece of the global mining pie by beefing up their fleet. For instance, Bitcoin mining company Stronghold Digital Mining announced that it is acquiring more than 9,000 additional miners to boost its capacity.
In a filing on Monday, Stronghold Digital Mining announced that it is buying additional Bitcoin mining rigs to boost its total hashrate. The company said that it “has entered into four separate agreements to acquire 9,080 Bitmain and MicroBT Bitcoin miners since the Company’s third quarter 2021 earnings release on November 30, 2021,”
The Pennsylvania-based Bitcoin mining company expects 4,800 to be delivered by year-end or in early January 2022. The first batch of new mining rigs was purchased at an aggregate price of $35.7 million and will add 426 petahash per second to the company’s mining capacity.
Meanwhile, the second batch of 4,280 miners will be delivered in the first half of 2022. This batch of miners was acquired under a profit share arrangement with the company’s existing partner Northern Data.
The two batches or 9,080 Bitcoin miners are expected to add an aggregate hash rate capacity of 826 petahash per second and will all be installed at Stronghold’s wholly-owned reclamation and power generation facilities. The company’s current mining fleet consists of over 54,000 Bitcoin miners with a hash rate capacity of approximately 5.2 exahash per second.
“During our third-quarter earnings call, we told our investors that we would continue to opportunistically procure miners from a variety of sources, as dictated by expected return profile and available capacity, and that is what we did over the last two weeks,” Stronghold co-chairman and CEO Greg Beard said.
The executive explained that the purchase of additional Bitcoin miners would aid the company’s rapid growth strategy and the near-term delivery schedules could help mitigate timing risks. “Additionally, the expansion of our profit share arrangement demonstrates our ability to creatively structure partnerships with industry leaders with a return profile that we believe is extremely attractive,” Beard added. “These purchases also highlight one of the key benefits of our low-cost, vertically integrated business model: we have access to power and capacity to plug in miners.”
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