Hut 8 Mining is seeing renewed demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing as it looks to restart the roughly 6,400 drilling rigs it moved from an idled site in North Sound, Ontario, Canada.
As previously reported, Hut 8 is launching legal proceedings with its third-party energy supplier, Validus Power, over alleged failure to fulfill contractual obligations. Operations at the mining facility have been suspended since November 2022.
In correspondence with Cointelegraph, Hut 8 declined to comment on the court case, but it confirmed that 6,400 miners are being relocated to Texas as the company looks to bring idled equipment back online.
The company expects this particular batch of miners to be operational by the end of July 2023, offering an operating capacity of 600 petahash per second, bringing the total installed hashrate of Hut 8 to 3.2 exahash per second.
A three-month hosting agreement has been reached for 6,400 miners in the North Bay, and Hut 8 plans to renew the arrangement on a monthly basis. Hut 8 previously moved 988 miners from the North Bay to its facility in Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada, in March 2023.
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Hut 8 CEO Jaime Leverton also spoke about the current climate in the cryptocurrency mining ecosystem, as market conditions have persisted for about 18 months:
“The industry has rebounded nicely over the past few months, and we’ve seen more momentum than initially expected, in part because some of our peers have followed our lead in HPC and AI computing.”
Artificial intelligence and high performance computing continue to attract attention and attract investment. Companies like Palo Alto-based Inflection AI raised $1.8 billion led by Microsoft and Nvidia, with some of that investment earmarked for building a cluster of 22,000 powerful Nvidia H100 Tensor GPUs.
Hut 8 has also begun deploying its infrastructure to support services and solutions outside of its Bitcoin (BTC) mining-focused business.
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