Welcome to Mining Wednesday, where Blockspace covers the Bitcoin mining, energy and AI infrastructure race.

For today’s newsletter, we’re covering a recent conversation on the ‘mullet miner’ strategy with Kevin Dede of H.C. Wainwright. Plus, the latest round of January production updates from public bitcoin miners

It’s about a 4 minute read.

NiceHash has moved to Switzerland, offering institutional miners a secure, compliant, and transparent platform to manage and maximize their mining output– delivering the reliability and performance expected from the best mining pools. 

A conversation with investment bank H.C. Wainwright’s Kevin Dede

If a bitcoin miner touts a pivot to AI but no investors are around to hear it, does its stock price pump?

Mining Pod listeners (and anyone paying attention to public bitcoin miner markets) know that AI/HPC pivots are en vogue. What started as a gradual trend last year has suddenly become a full blown business strategy.

Here are some highlights for new public miner forays into AI/HPC over just the last month:

• Lancium, Crusoe Energy bag a multi-billion dollar Project Stargate deal to build an HP/AI data center in Texas for OpenAI, Oracle, potentially others

• Riot pauses development on its 600 MW Corsicana expansion to evaluate the site for HPC/AI load

• Bitfarms taps consulting firm to evaluate its sites for AI/HPC use

• SoftBank invests $50 million in Cipher Mining for its AI/HPC efforts

These highlights don’t touch on the industry’s HPC trailblazers, namely Core Scientific, Bit Digital, Hut 8, Hive, and IREN. Each of these miners has been booking AI/HPC revenue since at least 2024. Most recently, Bit Digital – whose AI/HPC revenue outpaced its bitcoin mining revenue in Q3 – rebranded its HPC/AI business line as WhiteFiber, and it may even spin off this line entirely, CEO Sam Tabar revealed in the latest Bitcoin Stock Show for the The Mining Pod.

With SoftBank, OpenAI, and others collectively pledging up to $500 billion to accelerate AI developments in the United States through Project Stargate, where does the digital oil rush leave little ole bitcoin miners? 

Last week, we invited H.C. Wainwright Managing Director of Equity Research Kevin Dede on the Bitcoin Stock Show to explore the question. His takeaway: don’t bet against the miners who are serious about AI/HPC, but don’t discount pure-play bitcoin miners, either.

Read the full transcript here.

Brought to you by Luxor

Discover how 2024 became a pivotal year for Bitcoin mining, marked by next-gen ASICs, evolving energy markets, and increased institutional adoption. Explore the key trends and insights that shaped the industry and what they mean for 2025.

January 2025 public miner updates

Every month, we’ll be dedicating this section to public Bitcoin miner updates. Since miners don’t publish their updates at the same time, we’ll include as many as we can and add to the list the following weeks until we cover all the major players. Please note that we try to be as thorough as possible for each miner, but certain metrics are omitted if the miner does not report them.

Core Scientific

• Hashrate: 18.5 EH/s EoM (-3%)

• Hosting Hashrate: 1.0 EH/s (0%)

• Efficiency: 24.5 J/TH avg. (-0.4%)

• BTC mined: 256 (-6%)

• Further notes: Delivered 48,236 MWs to local grids via demand response over the month

Bit Digital

• Hashrate: 1.61 EH/s EoM (-10%)

• BTC mined: 28.7 (-11%)

• Crypto holdings: 769 BTC (+4%) | 27,623.9 ETH (+0.2%)

• AI revenue: $4.9 million (+9%)

• Further notes: Decrease in hashrate largely due to expiration of hosting contract, retiring older miners; Bit Digital is redeploying ASIC miners to new sites, including 191 Antminer S21s; company has 14 customers for its 4 MW Enovum data center

Hive

• Hashrate: 6 EH/s EoM (0%) | 5.7 EH/s avg. (+4%)

• Efficiency: 22 J/TH EoM (0%)

• BTC mined: 102 (-1%)

• BTC holdings: 2,657 (-5%)

• Further notes: Signed LOI to purchase an under-construction 200 MW site in Yguazu, Paraguay from Bitfarms; projects an increase in total MW capacity to 430 MW by Q3 2025

IREN

• Hashrate: 31 EH/s EoM (-10%) | 29 EH/s avg. (+3%)

• BTC mined: 521 (-2%)

• AI revenue: $0.8 million (0%)

• Operations: 510 MW (0%)

• Further notes: Construction of final 400 MWs of Childress, TX site underway; signed new contracts for Nvidia H200 GPU services in February

Hut 8

• Hashrate: 5 EH/s EoM (-9%)

• Managed services hashrate: 9.4 EH/s (0%)

• Hosting hashrate: 7.7 EH/s (0%)

• BTC mined: 65 (-27%)

• BTC holdings: 10,208 (+0.4%)

• Operations: 665 MW (0%)

• Further notes: 205 MW Vega, TX site “on track” for energization in Q2 2025

Cango

• Hashrate: 32 EH/s EoM (0%) | 30.1 EH/s avg. (-1%)

• BTC mined: 538.2 (-6%)

• BTC holdings: 1,472 (+58%)

Cleanspark

• Hashrate: 40.1 EH/s EoM (+3%) | 34.76 EH/s avg. (-2%)

• Efficiency: 16.15 J/TH EoM (-8%) | 17.37 J/TH avg. (-4%)

• BTC mined: 626 (-6%)

• BTC holdings: 10,556 (N/A)

• Operations: 873 MW (+2%)

• Further notes: 0.7 EH Twin City, GA site is 86% complete with full energization expected this month; 5 EH Cheyenne, Wyoming site for S21 XP immersion on track for completion in Q1

Riot

• Hashrate: 33.5 EH/s EoM (+6%) | 29.3 EH/s avg. (+7%)

• Reported power cost: $35/MWh (-8%)

• Curtailment credits: $3.6 million (+250%)

• Efficiency: 21.1 J/TH EoM (-9%) 

• BTC mined: 527 (+2%)

• BTC holdings: 18,221 (+3%)

• Further notes: First, 400 MW phase of Corsicana, TX completed and fully energized with 15.7 EH/s; second, 600 MW phase of Corsicana paused for assessment of AI/HPC conversion feasibility

MARA

• Hashrate: 53.2 EH/s EoM (0%) 

• BTC mined: 750 BTC (-13%)

• BTC holdings: 44,893* (*As of January 3, 2025)

• Further notes: 230 containers at Wolf Hollow, TX converted to immersion for S21 Pro models; “nearing full conversion” to S21 Pros at Kearney, NB site

Bitfarms

• Hashrate: 15.2 EH/s (+19%) | 11.2 EH/s avg. (+1%)

• Efficiency: 20 J/TH EoM (-1%)

• BTC mined: 201 (-5%)

• BTC holdings: 1,152 (+23%)

• Operations: 386 MW (+13%)

• Further notes: Signed LOI to sell 200 MW, under-development site in Yguazu, Paraguay to Hive; derating 2025 hashrate guidance by 14% to 18 EH/s “due to the underperformance of … T21 miners”; miner deliveries to continue through Q2 for multiple sites including Stronghold sites in PA

Cipher

• Hashrate: 13.5 EH/s EoM (+0%)

• Efficiency: 18.9 J/TH EoM (+0%) 

• BTC mined: 219 (-6%)

• BTC holdings: 1,091 (-19%)

• Further notes: Phase 1 of Black Pear, TX site “nearing completion”; Cipher recently took in $50 million investment from SoftBank toward AI/HPC business aspirations

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