Sustainability-focused Bitcoin mining firm CleanSpark is expanding its ASIC fleet by 12,500 units after investing $40.5 million into new hardware.
The added equipment is projected to bring CleanSpark’s total hash rate to over 16 exahashes per second (EH/s).
CleanSpark’s Mining Discount
According to a press release from CleanSpark on Thursday, the firm’s newly purchased fleet of Antminer S19 XP machines worked out to a cost of $23 per terahash ($/TH).
Data from Hashrate Index shows this is slightly lower than the industry average of $23.27/TH for machines of similar efficiency. On this matter, CleanSpark said:
“The Antminer S19 XP units have a power-efficiency rating of 21.5 joules per terahash (J/TH) and a bitcoin mining compute power (or hashrate) of 141 terahash per second (TH/s) each, for a combined total hash rate of 1.76 exahashes per second (EH/s).”
Costs for high-efficiency ASICs have consistently declined since June of last year, when Bitcoin’s freefall to under $20,000 made mining BTC far less profitable than during the bull market.
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Bitcoin’s return above $26,000 in March did little to break that trend, though this may be due to the increasing efficiency of ASIC machines over time. Indeed, though Bitcoin’s price remains down 61% from its all-time high, its global hash rate continues to break records with minimal interruption.
After this purchase, Cleanspark’s total fleet would technically represent 4.7% of global hashrate combined. However, its new machines won’t go active right away, with 6000 expected to arrive from the manufacturer in June, and the remaining 6500 expected for August.
The company’s CEO, Zach Bradford, also suggested that the new fleet could replace existing, less efficient machines, rather than simply adding to them, depending on how the economics play out.
CleanSpark’s Heavy Mining Investments
CleanSpark has already revealed purchases for tens of thousands of machines across multiple announcements this year. This includes 20,000 Antminer S19j Pro+ units for $13.15/TH in February and 45,000 Antminer S19 XP units for $23/TH in April.
Only the first of those purchased has been paid off in full so far, with “significant progress” made on paying off the April buy. On the most recent investment, CleanSpark CEO Gary A. Vecchiarelli said the company has “already fully funded and paid for the first half of this purchase, or approximately 6,650 machines.”
In late 2022, major North American mining firms including Core Scientific and Iris Energy struggled to pay down debt after taking out similar nine-figure loans to purchase new machines.
Other firms like Grayscale and CleanSpark deliberately waited for the crypto bear market to set in before deploying major capital toward mining infrastructure.
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