Marathon Digital to Expand Hashrate by 600% With Record Purchase of Bitcoin Miners

The Las Vegas-based miner expects to have 199,000 operational miners generating 23.3 exahashes by early 2023.

By James Rubin

Dec 23, 2021 at 9:16 p.m. UTC

Updated Dec 23, 2021 at 9:29 p.m. UTC

A bitcoin mining farm (Marko Ahtisaari/Flickr)

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James Rubin

James Rubin is CoinDesk's U.S. news editor based on the West Coast.

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Marathon Digital is purchasing a record number of Antminer S19 XP (140 TH/s) bitcoin miners from Bitmain, the Nasdaq-traded MARA announced Thursday.

Las Vegas-based Marathon did not disclose a total but claimed that in terms of exahashes per second (EX/s) the new machines will generate, the deal was the largest single order of Antminer S19 XP bitcoin miners ever from Bitmain.
Following earlier purchases this year, Marathon expects to have 199,000 operational miners generating 23.3 EH/s by early 2023, a 600% hashrate increase from current levels, the company confirmed to CoinDesk.
The fast-growing miner revised predictions from autumn when it expected to have 133,000 operational miners generating 13.3 EH/s by mid-2022.
As of Dec. 1, Marathon had 31,000 operational miners, producing 3.2 EX/s.
At the time of publication, Marathon Digital shares were up nearly 12% in Thursday trading.
Marathon has made multiple large purchases of miners this year, and in October it secured a $100 million revolving line of credit with Silvergate Bank in bitcoin and U.S. dollars. The miner said it would use the loan to fund bitcoin mining operations and to acquire new equipment.
“Given the strength of our balance sheet and our asset-light model, which allows us to invest our capital into mining machines rather than infrastructure, we were uniquely positioned to place the largest single order of S19 XPs, in terms of total hash rate, Bitmain has ever received,” Marathon CEO Fred Thiel said in a statement.

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James Rubin

James Rubin is CoinDesk's U.S. news editor based on the West Coast.

Follow @@JPRubin23 on Twitter

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James Rubin

James Rubin is CoinDesk's U.S. news editor based on the West Coast.

Follow @@JPRubin23 on Twitter