Riot Supercharges Mining Ops With 8,000 More Bitmain Rigs as Bitcoin Price Soars

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.