On Tuesday, the bitcoin mining company Cleanspark announced it acquired a plug-in-ready bitcoin mining facility that is scalable to 86 megawatts (MW) of capacity. Presently, the newly opened site in Washington, Georgia, has 36 megawatts, which is expected to give Cleanspark’s hashrate a 38% boost this quarter.
Publicly Listed Bitcoin Miner CleanSpark Expands Operations in Georgia
(Nasdaq: CLSK) revealed last month that it had acquired 1,061 bitcoin miners at a “discounted price,” after the company announced that it had acquired a new facility in Washington, the county seat of Wilkes County, Georgia. The new facility has the capacity to host up to 86 MW and CleanSpark purchased the facility for $16.2 million. The mining firm also purchased 3,400 Antminer S19 mining equipment for $8.9 million.
The Antminer rigs are currently in operation with 340 petahash per second (PH/s) of hashpower. “[Cleanspark] will fill the balance of the 36 MW with machines already paid for and on hand,” Tuesday’s announcement details. The new facility will be Cleanspark’s third clean-energy bitcoin mining facility in Georgia. The company says that it looks forward to growing the facility’s infrastructure and bolstering local jobs in the region. The site leverages low-carbon energy sources such as nuclear, Cleanspark’s announcement explains.
“We are excited to expand our footprint in Georgia,” Cleanspark CEO Zach Bradford said in a statement. The market has been preparing for consolidation all summer, and we are pleased to be on the acquisition side. Our focus on sustainability and maximizing value for our stakeholders has put us in a unique position to take advantage of the unprecedented opportunities created by the current market. Bradford continued:
We are especially excited to be working with the citizens of Washington, GA, who have been so welcoming to us. We look forward to maintaining and growing jobs and infrastructure at our new campus in Washington.
Shares of Cleanspark CLSK have seen a gain of 10.51 per cent during the last 30 days, but the one-year data shows that CLSK has lost 67.86 per cent. Several other publicly listed mining companies have seen stocks follow a similar downward trend as cryptocurrencies in the current bear market. For example, Marathon Digital Holdings (Nasdaq: MARA) reported that it posted negative Q2 results, but the company saw an increase in bitcoin production.
The price of bitcoin has hurt BTC mining revenue and the leading crypto asset’s hashrate slipped 1.7% lower in Q2 in comparison to the first quarter. Despite the crypto winter, Cleanspark has continued to expand and when it acquired two bulk orders of ASIC miners in July at a discount, Bradford highlighted that Cleanspark was seeing “unprecedented opportunities in this market.”
