Bitcoin Miner CleanSpark Buys 20,000 ASICs, Expands Capacity by 37%

Bitcoin mining company CleanSpark announced a purchase of 20,000 new ASIC machines on Thursday, after the asset rose to nearly $25,000 the previous day.

The new rigs will add 2.44 exahashes per second (EH/s) to the existing computing power of 6.6 EH/s. An exahash is equivalent to a quintillion hashes—input to solve the complex math problems required to mine new blocks.

That brings the company’s total hashrate to 9 EH/s—an increase of 37 percent—consisting of 2.8% of the entire Bitcoin network hash rate, passes by current numbers from Bitinfocharts.

CleanSpark expects to pay about $32.3 million for the purchase, a 25% discount or a total price per terrahash of about $13.25, the company said in a press release.

The machines purchased by the firm were Antminer S19j Pro+ units, which are 22% more productive than the Antminer S19j Pro announced in 2021. Deliveries are expected early next month, with all batches arriving at the company’s mining campus by the end of May.

CleanSpark, which markets itself as a sustainability-focused miner, operates several mining facilities across the United States, including a facility in Washington, Georgia, to which it will direct 15,000 of its newly purchased machines. The extension, announced last month, will more than double its infrastructure capacity from 36 megawatts to 86 megawatts.

The expansion comes just two months after US mining giants like Nuclear science filed for bankruptcy, while others such as Iris Energy saw a number of mining rigs liquidated due to failure to pay off debt.

Iris, on the other hand, recently announced plans to rebuild its capacity earlier this week, according to Blockstream confirmed a $125 million increase to expand its hosting services in late January.

“While it’s too early to call a bull market in, the upward price momentum makes miners much more optimistic,” CleanSpark’s chief communications officer Isaac Holyoak said via email. “Especially when you compare today’s BTC prices to the end of 2022 when miners also saw higher energy costs.”

Bitcoin’s 49% rise since the start of the year makes mining a more profitable endeavor since miner rewards are mostly denominated in a fixed number of BTC per block. Data from Glassnode last month proposed that the average Bitcoin miner returned to a net profit position when the asset recovered $18,800.

Despite the momentum, Holoyak said his company is not yet in HODL mode. “We continue to sell a large portion of our bitcoin and reinvest it in infrastructure and machinery,” he wrote.