Cleanspark, a publicly-traded company that mines bitcoins, announced on June 1, 2023, that it had bought 12,500 Antminer S19 XP bitcoin miners for $40.5 million. Cleanspark’s hashrate should go up by 1.76 exahashes per second (EH/s) because of the purchase.
Cleanspark’s hashpower will go up by 1.76 EH/s thanks to an acquisition.
Cleanspark (Nasdaq: CLSK) has bought a large number of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) bitcoin miners over the course of 2023. The company got 20,000 new Bitmain mining rigs for $43.6 million in February and 45,000 Antminer S19 XP units in the middle of April. The last thing the company bought was 12,500 Antminer S19 XP bitcoin mines for $40.5 million.
Cleanspark says that the cost was about $23 per terahash ($/TH), which is less than what the market value is now. The company said that 6,000 machines would be shipped in June and the rest would be sent in August. There will be one of these ASIC bitcoin mining machines in each of Cleanspark’s data centers. The company says that 90% of the power used by the Bitcoin miner comes from “low-carbon energy sources.”
In a statement, Cleanspark CEO Zach Bradford said, “this purchase ensures that we are prepared to meet and potentially exceed our year-end target of 16 EH/s and also positions us to be one of the most power-efficient miners on an energy-per- hashrate basis.” He also mentioned that “this additional machine purchase also gives us substantial optionality to replace the units in our existing fleet that consume more than 30 joules per terahash while allowing us to maintain less efficient machines only if the economics support doing so.”
Cleanspark’s news comes after bitcoin miners had to deal with a tough crypto bear market in the last part of 2022. Also, many other mining companies have grown in recent years. For example, Stronghold Digital teamed up with Cantaloupe Digital LLC, which is a branch of Canaan, which makes ASIC bitcoin miners. This deal made Stronghold’s hashrate 400 petahash per second (PH/s) faster, and on May 30, the company announced that its total hashpower had hit 3 EH/s.
Cleanspark has found a lot of chances in the crypto bear market. The CFO of Cleanspark, Gary A. Vecchiarelli, said, “We continue to make use of opportunities created by the current market conditions to prepare for next year’s bitcoin halving.” He continued, “This order of XPs not only adds to our hashrate, but the efficiency of these machines also results in less power consumed per bitcoin mined compared to older generation miners, which should translate to higher margins.”
