Iris Energy Secures 600MW Connection for Texas Bitcoin Mine
The Texas facility will boost the miners' total hashrate to 15.2 EH/s in 2023.
Jan 21, 2022 at 1:46 p.m. UTCUpdated May 11, 2023 at 5:58 p.m. UTC
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A bitcoin mining farm. (Marko Ahtisaari/Flickr)
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Australian crypto miner Iris Energy (IREN) secured a 600-megawatt connection for a new Texas crypto mining facility, the company said on Friday.
- The company said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it has executed a binding connection agreement with utility provider AEP Texas.
- Iris Energy paid $19 million for the security deposit and the connection fee, the filing said. The data centers in Texas are expected to be energized in the first quarter of 2023, the miner said.
- Iris Energy has secured a 300 acre freehold site in the Texas Panhandle, the state's northernmost region, which will be connected directly to the grid through a 345-kilovolt transmission line, the filing said.
- Iris Energy recorded a hashrate of 748 petahash per second (PH/s) in December 2021. It plans to add 2.9 exahash per second (EH/s) across two sites in British Columbia, with mining rigs it has already secured, by the end of 2022. Another 11.6 EH/s are planned for 2023, including 10.6 EH/s in the Panhandle facility.
- The company could add another 7 EH/s in the Texas facility if it secures more mining rigs, bringing its total computing power to 22 EH/s - almost 14% of the bitcoin network's current hashrate.
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Eliza Gkritsi is a CoinDesk contributor focused on the intersection of crypto and AI.