Riot Blockchain is buying 8,000 additional S19 Pro Antminers from BitmainTech PTE as the publicly traded company looks to compete in a bitcoin mining scene getting more difficult by the day.
- Miners are flocking to take advantage of bitcoin's recent price surge. But they can only do so by deploying massive operations, as evidenced by all-time high network difficulty rates and recent rig acquisitions.
- Once fully online in early 2021, the rigs will vault Riot Blockchain's hashrate – the computing power dedicated to mining bitcoin blocks – well above 1 exahash per second, according to a Monday press release.
- Riot Blockchain says it will have 15,040 deployed rigs posting 1.45 exashashes per second and consuming 47 megawatts of energy once it installs the Antminers.
- But that day won't come until next April at the earliest. Bitmain will begin delivering 2,000 S19 Pro Antminers per month starting in January 2021.
- Riot is spending $17.7 million on the rigs. It's a bulk discount that Riot says comes in spite of bitcoin's rocketing valuation.
- "With our current miner deployment schedule, we anticipate that based upon current factors, Riot would achieve positive cash flow in late 2020," Chairman Remo Mancini said in the statement.
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