One of the largest cryptocurrency mining companies – Marathon Digital Holdings – bought 78,000 Antminer S-19 XP Miners from the Chinese manufacturer – Bitmain. To acquire the equipment, the firm spent nearly $900 million.
Marathon Deepens Its Mining Efforts
According to the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Marathon Digital Holdings (NASDAQ symbol: MARA) will receive the machinery in the second half of 2022. Bitmain will deliver 13,000 units per month in July, August, September, October, November, and December.
The equipment is the newest generation Antminer S-19 XP Miners. Marathon paid $879.06 million for the deal.
The news was announced nearly a week ago, but the acquisition price became evident today. It is worth noting that upon disclosing the information back then, MARA’s shares jumped by 10% in a single trading day.
The company expects its operations to grow to nearly 200K bitcoin miners producing ~23.3 EH/s by early 2023. This should represent a 600% increase from the current production levels.
Last month, Marathon Digital revealed its plans to raise $500 million through the issuance of senior convertible notes. The firm explained it wanted to use the proceeds to buy bitcoin and BTC mining machines.
Marathon Digital is not the first publicly-traded company to raise debt to purchase amounts of the primary cryptocurrency. The NASDAQ-listed giant – MicroStrategy – has done that on a few occasions, ultimately raising over $1 billion to buy BTC.
Stronghold Digital Also Purchased Mining Machinery
Earlier this month, the Pennsylvania-based company – Stronghold Digital Mining – bought 9,080 Bitmain and MicroBT mining rigs. The purchase will allow it to add roughly 826 petahashes per second (PH/s) to its power generation capacity.
Stronghold Digital will receive the mining rigs by the first quarter of 2022 as all of them will be installed on its wholly-owned power generation facilities. The firm also admitted it is willing to acquire additional 54,000 mining rigs with a total hashrate of 5.2 exahashes per second soon.
The entity announced another deal focused on its long-term strategy. It got into an equipment financing agreement with New York Digital Investment Group (NYDIG) for approximately $54 million. The deal is collateralized by purchasing 12,000 S19j Pro Antminers from Bitmain, and Stronghold has already received an $18.6 million advance, the latter confirmed.