Bitmain to host 56,000 bitcoin miners in Georgia State via joint mining deal

Bitcoin mining hardware manufacturing giant Bitmain is set to boost its joint mining capacity in North America.

The firm has entered into a bitcoin mining hosting deal with data center and power partners Bit5ive and ISW Holdings, which will house 56,000 units of Bitmain’s proprietary AntMiner equipment in the U.S. state of Georgia. 

According to a statement on Wednesday, the entire mining fleet will be using 200 megawatts (MW) of capacity when fully deployed by October 2022. The first 20 MW of capacity is expected to be up and running by next month, the firms said.

That means the mining equipment model to be used in the deal is Bitmain’s newest generation of AntMiner S19 series, which have an average hashing power of 100 terahashes per second (TH/s). When fully deployed, the entire fleet will have about 5.6 exahashes per second (EH/s) of hash rate.

ISW Holdings, the hosting partner in the deal, said the cost for it to roll out and activate the facility will total $62 million with $6 million already being paid.

With the deal, Bitmain joins a growing list of institutional miners that are expanding their crypto mining infrastructure in North America following China’s crackdown on the mining industry earlier this summer.

Bitmain also led a $32 million investment round in June into Dallas-based Applied Blockchain along with Ethereum mining pool Sparkpool. 

As part of the investment, Bitmain reserves long-term hosting capacity at Applied Blockchain’s facilities when the infrastructure becomes operational. 

Applied Blockchain said at the time that it expected the first 50 MW be operational by the end of the year with another 50 MW to be ready by the first quarter next year.