Hut 8 relocates 6,400 rigs, sees growth in AI and high-performance computing

Bitcoin mining firm Hut8 continues to relocate miners from its idle North Bay site, with increasing demand for AI and high-power computing.

Hut 8 Mining is seeing new demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing as it looks to reenergize some 6,400 rigs being moved from its inactive North Bay site in Ontario, Canada.

As previously reported, Hut 8 is in an ongoing legal battle with its third-party energy supplier Validus Power over alleged failure to meet contractual obligations. Operations at the mining facility have been suspended since November 2022.

Hut 8 declined to comment on court case proceedings in correspondence with Cointelegraph, but it confirmed that 6,400 miners are being moved to Texas as the company looks to bring its idle equipment back online.

The firm expects this specific batch of miners to be operational by the end of July 2023, providing 600 petahashes per second of operational capacity, taking Hut 8’s total installed hash rate up to 3.2 exahashes per second.

A three-month hosting agreement for the 6,400 miners from North Bay has been agreed upon, with Hut 8 planning to renew the arrangement on a month-to-month basis. Hut 8 previously moved 988 miners from North Bay to its Medicine Hat facility in Alberta, Canada, in March 2023.

Hut 8 CEO Jaime Leverton also touched on the current climate for the cryptocurrency mining ecosystem in light of tough market conditions that have prevailed for some 18 months:

“The industry has rebounded well over the past few months and we have seen more momentum than originally anticipated, partly due to some of our peers following our lead in the HPC and AI computing spaces.”

AI and high-performance computing continue to grab attention and attract investment. The likes of Palo Alto-based Inflection AI raised $1.8 billion led by Microsoft and Nvidia, with part of the investment earmarked for the construction of a 22,000-strong Nvidia H100 Tensor GPU cluster.

Hut 8 has also begun deploying its infrastructure to power services and solutions outside its Bitcoin (BTC) mining-focused operations.

Leverton highlighted a new five-year agreement to provide computer infrastructure and hosting services to British Columbia’s Interior Health authority, as well as a case study carried out with 3D generative AI firm XYZ AI.

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