Cipher Mining, a U.S.-based Bitcoin mining company, aims to bring its total hash rate capacity to over 7.2 EH/s following the addition of 11,000 new A1346 model machines that it has purchased from Canaan, the Chinese manufacturer of cryptocurrency mining equipment.
With this purchase, the company’s machine fleet has increased to over 70,000 mining rigs, Cipher said in a press release.
“We are excited to formally begin our collaboration with Canaan, a pioneer in the ASIC high-performance computing chip industry,” Cipher CEO Tyler Page said in a statement.
According to Page, Cipher's technology and operations teams have been working with Canaan to test its new generation mining machines over the past several months.
"We are confident that Canaan’s mining machines will be an excellent addition to our fleet, and we expect these mining machines to perform extremely well during the hot summer months in Texas,” he said.
Canaan’s A1346 model is part of the new Avalon Made A13 series, which was launched in October 2022, and comes with a hash rate of 110 TH/s and power efficiency of 30J/TH, making it an attractive alternative to popular Whatsminer and Antminer ASICs.
Cipher said it expects the new machines to be delivered and energized in the third quarter of this year, with the move completing the buildout at the company’s facility in Odessa, Texas.
"This will reinforce our position as a leading Bitcoin miner," a Cipher spokesperson told Decrypt.
In today’s Q1 2023 update, Cipher said the company has achieved a self-mining capacity of over 6.0 EH/s, exceeding the projected hash rate of 5.7 EH/s it was targeting in March.
Cipher, which went public on the Nasdaq in August 2021, saw its stock drop roughly 4% today at market open today.
Today’s announcement came as Bitcoin’s hash rate—the measurement of how much computing power is used to secure the network—last week soared to a new all-time high of 356 EH/s, before dropping to 345.4 EH/s as of yesterday, per Blockchain.com.
Bitcoin mining difficulty, which measures the complexity of producing new blocks, meanwhile fell 1.45% to 48.01T on May 4, with a further drop of 0.35% expected after the next difficulty adjustment in nine days.