Capitalizing on buyer’s market, CleanSpark acquires 1,800 bitcoin miners

Bitcoin miner CleanSpark acquired 1,800 Antminer S19 XP machines, leveraging current market conditions to secure a better deal.

The company said that the new miners will add over 252 petahashes per second (PH/s) to its bitcoin mining capacity, according to an announcement Thursday.

CleanSpark expects the new machines to start arriving starting August, with further shipments in the six months following.

“We were able to secure the contract at an exceptional price because of our strategic relationships and the unique circumstances that current market conditions have created,” said CEO Zach Bradford.

The company pointed out that it has taken an “infrastructure-first” approach — meaning that it has prioritized securing power first and then backfilling with machine orders.

“Given that spot prices are dropping, we are in a unique position to be able to acquire mining machines at lower prices, and sometimes much lower prices, than if we had purchased huge quantities last year,” Bradford told The Block recently over email.

Market opportunities

During Argo’s recent first-quarter 2022 earnings call, CEO Peter Wall said that access to power is increasingly becoming more of a challenge for miners than acquiring machines. 

“I can’t emphasize right now how important that access to power is and how important Helios is for us. We are continually hearing reports and having phone calls with people in the space and infrastructure is hard to get right now,” Wall said.

Core Scientific CEO Mike Levitt said that the company had not placed any machine orders so far in 2022 and was now in a good position to take advantage of a more favorable market.

“We had a point of view that, in fact, there would be perhaps difficult times for all of these companies that had put in big orders and that there might be an opportunity to pick up units at better value in the future,” Levitt said. 

CleanSpark also announced a partnership with TMGcore to expand its immersion mining. The company will get 257 tanks, which fit 28 Antminer S19j each. Additionally, it will get 2 megawatts of colocation capacity at a TMGcore facility in Texas.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.