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Sustainability-oriented Bitcoin mining company CleanSpark is enhancing its ASIC fleet by 12,500 units following an investment of $40.5 million in new hardware.
The additional equipment is anticipated to elevate CleanSpark’s total hash rate to over 16 exahashes per second (EH/s).
CleanSpark’s Mining Discount
As stated in a press release from CleanSpark on Thursday, the firm’s recently acquired fleet of Antminer S19 XP machines has a cost of $23 per terahash ($/TH).
Data from Hashrate Index indicates that this figure is marginally lower than the industry average of $23.27/TH for machines with comparable efficiency. Regarding this, CleanSpark commented:
“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).”
Prices for high-efficiency ASICs have steadily decreased since June of the previous year, when Bitcoin’s drop below $20,000 significantly reduced mining profitability compared to the bull market.
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Bitcoin’s rise above $26,000 in March did little to alter this trend, possibly due to the ongoing improvements in ASIC machine efficiency. Indeed, while Bitcoin’s price remains 61% lower than its all-time peak, its global hash rate continues to set new records with minimal disruption.
Following this acquisition, CleanSpark’s total fleet would technically account for 4.7% of the global hashrate combined. However, the new machines are not expected to become operational immediately, with 6,000 anticipated to arrive from the manufacturer in June, and the remaining 6,500 expected in August.
The company’s CEO, Zach Bradford, also indicated that the new fleet might replace existing, less efficient machines, rather than merely augmenting them, depending on how the economic factors evolve.
CleanSpark’s Heavy Mining Investments
CleanSpark has already disclosed purchases for tens of thousands of machines through various 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.
So far, only the first of those purchases has been fully paid off, with “significant progress” made on settling the April acquisition. Regarding the latest investment, CleanSpark CEO Gary A. Vecchiarelli stated that the company has “already fully funded and paid for the first half of this purchase, or approximately 6,650 machines.”
In late 2022, prominent North American mining companies such as Core Scientific and Iris Energy faced challenges in repaying debt after securing similar nine-figure loans to acquire new machines.
Other firms like Grayscale and CleanSpark intentionally delayed deploying significant capital toward mining infrastructure until the crypto bear market commenced.
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