Altcoin News: Bitmain Plans to Launch New Mining Farm with 200.000 ASIC Miners

March 23, 2019, by Marko Vidrih on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE

Operators of mining farms in the southeastern provinces of China reported that Bitmain plans to expand its computing capacity by installing about 200,000 pieces of equipment in the region.

This decision is associated with the coming rainy season soon and, as a result, the reduction in the cost of electricity generated by hydroelectric power plants.

Sources said CoinDesk that although the surplus of hydroelectric power is not expected until May, the company’s management is currently negotiating with local farms to house their miners with them.

Bitmain will mainly use devices from the new line: Antminer S11, S15 and only the S17 that is planned to be launched into production, however, it is likely that older models such as AntMiner S9i / j will be involved.

When calculating the hashrate of the old equipment, after the launch of all these farms, an additional 2.8 Eh / s (about 5% of the current hashing capacity) will appear in the network, while when new miners are started on 7-nm chips, the “additive” will be 6–7 Eh /s, which will increase the difficulty of mining by more than 10%.

If we take into account the cost of S9j and S11, which are sold at $400 and $500, respectively, then it turns out that the sale of this equipment could bring about $80- $100 million. At the same time, S15 is sold at $1,000, which means the scale of costs is even greater. However, it should be understood that in the current reality, mining on these devices using cheaper electricity can be much more profitable than selling them.

Also, it is not reported exactly what conditions Bitmain will receive from power engineers. Local miners say that in summer the price per kilowatt * hour is about $0.037 (2.36 rubles). Based on F2pool data, it can be assumed that S9j, S11, and S15 will bring $1.29, $2.24 and $3.38 per day for such a cost of electricity, respectively. It turns out that using even less profitable S9j Bitmain can earn about $7.7 million per month at the current BTC rate.

Recall that this week the company introduced a new device for mining cryptocurrency on the Equihash algorithm.

Author: Marko Vidrih