Marathon Announces Purchase of Bitmain Miners
One of the top North American bitcoin mining firms, Marathon, which is one of the world’s largest as well, announced entering into a new purchase agreement with bitcoin mining machine manufacturer, Bitmain. The deal has been signed for the acquisition of an unspecific number of Antminer S19 XP models. Not only is this ASIC more capable than previous iterations, it is also capable of delivering a 140 TH/s hash rate. Marathon hopes that by early 2023, it will host about 199,000 miners. Marathon Digital Holdings is interested in purchasing the newest miners because they deliver higher mining power and their energy efficiency is also the highest.
The manufacturer chose not to disclose the number of miners they had ordered in the new agreement, but it estimated that it will be able to host 199,000 miners that will be able to produce a hashrate of about 23.3 EH/s by 2023. The new machines are expected to be shipped between the period of July 2022 and December 2022. As compared to Marathon’s current hashrate, the new predicted hashrate would be an increase of 600%. The chief executive of Marathon, Peter Thiel stated that taking their asset-light model into account and their balance sheet, they are able to invest their capital into mining machines rather than infrastructure.
The CEO said that they were in the unique position of placing the largest single order for the new miners that Bitmain has ever received in terms of the total hashrate. This announcement marks a year of growth for Marathon, which has managed to secure miners for all its facilities around the United States. Marathon had purchased 30,000 S19j Pro miners last August from Bitmain. Back then, the company had estimated that the new batch of machines would be able to increase its existing mining power by 13 EH/s. The miner batch had cost a total of $120 million.
Earlier this month, the company had also announced that it had signed a deal with Compute North to provide 100K miners with secured hosting, which would also help them in powering most of these machines with renewables, including wind and solar. The company also communicated that it was planning on raising about $500 million in senior notes with the intention of acquiring bitcoin, or could also use them for acquiring additional machines for bitcoin mining in November. This is just an indication of how the demand for crypto mining is growing.
Back in May, China had imposed a ban on all crypto mining activities in the country, which had been considered a major blow to the industry. After all, China was contributing 60% to the overall mining. However, by all appearances, it seems that crypto mining has managed to retain its pace and it even might be picking up. Crypto miners have relocated to other regions, especially where electricity is cheap, including Russia, the United States and even Kazakhstan. The demand for mining machines has also increased significantly, as the increase in crypto prices is making this activity more profitable, which means there is an influx of miners in the space.
