US Contract Miner Core Scientific Buys 17,600 Bitcoin Miners From Bitmain

U.S. contract mining firm Core Scientific has agreed on a deal to buy 17,600 mining rigs from Chinese bitcoin hardware maker Bitmain Technologies Inc.

The company is buying Bitmain’s next-generation bitcoin (BTC) miner, the Antminer S19, it said in a statement on June 29. The miners will be fully installed at data centers operated by Core Scientific in the U.S. over the next four months, it added.

Washington-based Core Scientific did not provide details about cost, but the deal might come to a total of between $30 million and $42 million. Each S19 machine is currently selling at $1,785 while the newer S19 Pro is going for $2,407, according to the Bitmain shop.

Core Scientific said that the purchase is on behalf of its institutional customers and for its own use. It also claims the deal to be the largest acquisition of S19 BTC miners by a single blockchain hosting company.

Company president and chief executive officer Kevin Turner commented:

Core Scientific has received and begun testing the first of Bitmain’s newest ASIC miners, and has seen material success in increasing existing hashrate to achieve a 110 TH/s ± 3%.

Bitmain confirmed the deal in a blog post. The Antminer 19 series uses the latest generation of SHA256 Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) from Bitmain, making it more energy-efficient compared to previous models from the Beijing-based entity.

According to F2pool, a large global bitcoin mining network, the Antminer S19 model generates up to $3.03 of profit each day. The Antminer S19 Pro, Bitmain’s latest offering, makes a profit of $4.12 per day. The figures are based on an average electricity cost of $0.05 per kilowatt-hour (kWh).

The Antminer S19 has a computing power or hashrate of 95 terahash per second (TH/s) and power efficiency of 37.5 joules per terahash (J/TH). The Pro version comes with 110 TH/s and a power efficiency of 29.5 J/TH.

Bitcoin miners have been forced to look for more efficient mining equipment since the supply cut event of May 11, which slashed miner revenue by 50% from 12.5 to 6.25 BTC per block. The United States appears to be upping its game on this front.

What do you think about Core Scientific’s ambitions? Let us know in the comments section below.

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via Jeffrey Gogo