Sustainability-focused Bitcoin mining company CleanSpark has expanded its ASIC fleet to 12,500 units after investing $40.5 million in new hardware.
The added hardware is planned to bring CleanSpark’s total hash rate to over 16 exahashes per second (EH/s).
The CleanSpark Mining Discount
According to a press release from CleanSpark on Thursday, the company’s newly purchased fleet of Antminer S19 XP machines is working at a cost of $23 per terahash ($/TH).
Data from Index of Hashrate shows that this is slightly lower than the industry average of $23.27/TH for machines of the same efficiency. On this matter, CleanSpark said:
“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. at 1.76 exahashes per second (EH/s).”
Costs for high-efficiency ASICs have been steadily declining since June of last year, when Bitcoin’s freefall to below $20,000 made mining BTC less profitable than during the bull market.
Bitcoin’s return above $26,000 in March did little to break that trend, although this may be due to the increasing efficiency of ASIC machines over time. In fact, even though the price of Bitcoin remains down 61% from an all-time high, it is global hash rate continues to break records with little interruption.
After this purchase, Cleanspark’s total fleet will technically represent 4.7% of the global hashrate combined. However, its new engines won’t be moving quickly, 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 engines, rather than add to them, depending on how the economy performs.
CleanSpark Mining Investments
CleanSpark has already announced purchases for thousands of machines in several announcements this year. This includes 20,000 Antminer S19j Pro+ units at $13.15/TH in February and 45,000 Antminer S19 XP units at $23/TH in April.
Only the first of those purchases have been paid in full so far, with “significant progress” made in paying off the April purchase. On the latest investment, CleanSpark CEO Gary A. Vecchiarelli said the company “has fully funded and paid for the first half of this purchase, or approximately 6,650 machines.”
By late 2022, the top mining companies in North America include Scientific Core and Iris Energy is struggling to repay the loan after taking similar nine-figure loans to buy new engines.
Some companies like Grayscale and CleanSpark deliberately waited for the crypto bear market to settle before deploying large capital into the mining infrastructure.
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