HIVE Digital Technologies Ltd. (HIVE) is pleased to announce the unaudited production figures from the Company's global Bitcoin operations for the month of August 2023, with 274 Bitcoin produced in August. The Company has maintained over 3.67 Exahash ("EH/s") of Bitcoin mining capacity on average for August 2023, including ASIC and GPU BTC hashrate (all amounts in US dollars, unless otherwise indicated).
Summary Overview:
- HIVE produced 274 Bitcoin in the month of August, from ASIC and GPU mining operations, representing an average of 74.7 Bitcoin Per Exahash, with an average hashrate of 3.67 EH/s for the month of August 2023;
- HIVE produced an average of 8.8 BTC per day in August 2023;
- HIVE ended the month with 3.69 EH/s of mining capacity, including ASIC and GPU BTC hashrate.
AI and HPC Update
Aydin Kilic, President & CEO of HIVE stated, "We are thrilled to announce our order of high performance SuperMicro servers, which will further increase our AI compute infrastructure capacity by over 2.5 times." The Company notes it recently announced that its AI and HPC infrastructure compute tripled. Thus, this new order with SuperMicro, further increases the compute capacity by a factor of 2.5x. Once installed, these servers will provide the compute backbone to allow 2,400 of our Nvidia GPUs to perform AI and HPC compute, in addition to our 400 Nvidia GPUs which were part of our successful beta test earlier this year, where we realized $1 million of annual run rate revenue. The Company expects all these SuperMicro servers to be installed and operational by the end of October 2023. This is a major milestone towards our year-end target of realizing $15 million of annual run rate revenue from this growing phase of our business."
"Additionally, we are excited to announce the expansion of our AI and HPC infrastructure offering into North America, in addition to our current operations in Sweden. Our North American AI and HPC infrastructure will be based in Canada, and the first servers are expected to come online in September. HIVE is also excited to receive our enterprise grade networking equipment, which will upgrade our AI and HPC servers in Sweden. This will allow 100 GBe interconnect speeds and will allow us to serve users with high-end AI and HPC compute demands. Enterprise grade network equipment for our Canadian facility is expected to follow shortly thereafter."
Where HIVE has been a technology leader in crypto-mining, our team with the knowledge and experience of operating a fleet of approximately 150,000 GPUs during the Ethereum mining era, now aspires to apply their expertise to the Company's long-term blue-sky vision to implement our 38,000 Nvidia GPUs for HPC and AI workloads."
August 2023 Production Figures
Mr. Kilic continued "Our focus has been to upgrade our fleet of ASICs, as well as find new generation ASICs available for immediate delivery, so they can be quickly installed to realize cash flow return on invested capital."
Luke Rossy, VP of Operations commented "We expected to have an additional 1,700 BuzzMiners installed in New Brunswick in August. We have installed 300 BuzzMiners so far, however, 1,400 remain due to delays in our PDU upgrades. These are normal, course-of-business delays. We are happy to report progress where all of the 2,000 Bitmain S19 XP Antminers have been installed in our Lachute facility in Quebec. The acquisition of these machines was announced less than one month ago."
The Company's total Bitcoin production in August 2023 was:
- 260 BTC produced from ASICs from an average hashrate of 3.5 EH/s from ASICs in August;
- 8.4 BTC produced per day on average from ASICs, and 74.7 BTC/EH from ASICs in August;
- 3.69 EH/s of BTC month end Hashrate as of August 31, comprised of 3.531 EH/s of ASIC BTC hashrate and 0.163 EH/s of GPU BTC Hashrate;
- This represents a 1% month over month end increase in BTC ASIC hashrate (July 31 month end was 3.64 EH/s);
- Monthly average of 3.67 EH/s, comprised of an average of 3.485 EH/s of ASIC mining capacity and average of 186 PH/s of Bitcoin GPU mining capacity during the month of August;
- This is a 6% month over month increase in BTC average hashrate from ASICs and GPUs combined (July average BTC hashrate was 3.46 EH/s).
Bitcoin Global Network Mining Difficulty Is Volatile
Network difficulty factors are a significant variable in the Company's gross profit margins. The Bitcoin network difficulty was 52.33 T as of August 1, and increased to an all-time high of 55.62 T as of August 31. Accordingly, Bitcoin mining difficulty ended the month about 6% higher than the beginning of the month.
The Bitcoin Network Difficulty is a publicly available statistic, which reflects the total number of Bitcoin miners online and is important in analyzing a company's gross profit margins, and number of Bitcoin produced. This data is available on many websites, here is one citation: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/difficulty
As more people mine Bitcoin (difficulty increases), the daily Bitcoin block reward which presently is fixed at 900 Bitcoin per day, gets split amongst more miners; thus, each miner receives a smaller portion of the block reward. Conversely, as Bitcoin prices fall, many miners may lose money, and power down, thus taking their hashrate off the network, causing Network Difficulty to decrease.
Those miners with the lowest costs of production, by virtue of having more efficient machines and/or lower energy costs, are able to continue their production during these volatile cycles. Not all miners will continuously mine during the month, as a result some miners will produce less Bitcoin than expected, relative to their advertised hashrate. For the foregoing reasons, HIVE will self-curtail part of its operations if the unhedged spot energy prices are uneconomical, thereby leaving part of its total gross hashrate unutilized.
All Bitcoin miners are striving to use the most efficient Bitcoin ASIC chips, and we are happy that we have been able to upgrade our global fleet during this crypto market downturn.
Clarification to August 11, 2023, Release
In the Company's press release dated August 11, 2023, it disclosed that, pursuant to the at-the-market equity program established by the prospectus supplement dated May 10, 2023 (the "May 2023 ATM") it had issued an aggregate of 534,400 common shares over the TSX Venture Exchange from the period between May 10, 2023 and June 30, 2023 at an average price of C$4.92, and paid cash commission of $60,901.00. The Company clarifies and confirms that the average price of the shares issued during this period pursuant to the May 2023 ATM was C$5.02 and the total commissions paid were $60,808.53.