CleanSpark Doubles Bitcoin Mining Fleet With $145 Million Deal
US Bitcoin miner CleanSpark today announced the closing of a $144.9 million deal to purchase 45,000 of Bitmain’s Antminer S19 XP Bitcoin miners, which will be delivered by the end of September to its Sandersville, Georgia facility.
The first wave of 25,000 miners will arrive in groups throughout August, with the rest arriving the following month; all machines are expected to be deployed by the end of the year.
Once deployed, CleanSpark’s fleet in Georgia will have added 6.3 exahashes per second (EH/s) of computing power to the company’s current capacity of 6.7 EH/s, a 95% increase.
CleanSpark also purchased 20,000 miners in February, which are currently being delivered to the company’s facility in Washington, which is also located in Georgia. When these machines are up and running later this quarter, the Washington facility will add 2.44 EH/s to the company’s total operational hash rate.
CleanSpark now claims to have a total of 15.9 EH/s either deployed or under contract, with a goal by the end of the year to reach a staggering 16 EH/s.
To put it in perspective, according to an estimate from CoinWarzthe total hashrate of the Bitcoin mining network stands at just under 322.53 EH/si day.
So if all the machines were to come online today, CleanSpark would have acquired roughly 5% of Bitcoin’s global computing power.
Pure mining
Like their peers on TeraWulfCleanSpark’s genesis predates Bitcoin mining and has its roots in the power industry.
CleanSpark was founded in 1987 as a software and energy solutions company and took its first steps to operate Bitcoin mining facilities relatively recently in 2020.
The company markets itself as “sustainable Bitcoin mining” and aims to achieve 100% renewable energy across the mining operation. Today, CleanSpark says it stands for carbon-free energy 90% of the total energy mix.
At the company’s largest facility in Sandersville, it has so far achieved 72% carbon-free energy, according to the company’s latest energy disclosure.
CleanSpark’s latest energy disclosure across its facilities. Source: CleanSpark Investor’s Deck.
As for choosing Georgia to set up a large part of their store, CleanSpark Communications Manager Isaac Holyoak shared Decrypt that“Georgia, and especially the communities in which we work, see our data centers as important sources of economic strength.”
“Sales tax on our energy bills provides hundreds of thousands of dollars a month for local programs and infrastructure,” he said. “We work hard to cultivate strong relationships at the community level, with mayors, city councils and local residents and do our best to give back. Our major power supplier in Georgia, MEAG, sources large amounts of low carbon energy and has been a great partner.”
Throughout the last two quarters of 2022, many miners felt the full force of the bear market, leading to more high-profile bankruptcieswhile operations like Core Scientific and Argo dumped their Bitcoin to shore up their balance sheets.
CleanSpark was one of the few operations that saw it through the tough times, according to Holyoak.
“We have used the bear market to build. So, far from being a difficult time, it has been a time of tremendous growth for us. We bought two new data centers and expanded our fleet with tens of thousands of miners purchased at some of the best market prices possible,” he said.
“When it comes to selling Bitcoin, we’ve always been pragmatic HODLers,” Holyoak said. “We have long had a strategy of selling a portion of the Bitcoin we mine to fund our growth and operations – so no changes there for us.”
