The company expects growth in artificial intelligence and high-performance computing
Hut 8 Mining is seeing new demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing as it tries to reactivate the approximately 6,400 rigs that will be moved from its North Bay, Ontario, Canada dump site.
Like reported previously Hut 8 was in a legal battle with energy supplier Validus Power for alleged failure to meet its contractual obligations. Activities at the mining facility have been suspended since November 2022.
Hut 8 declined to comment on court proceedings in a correspondence with Cointelegraph, but confirmed that 6,400 miners had moved to Texas as the company plans to bring its idle equipment back online.
The company expects this dedicated miner group to be operational by the end of July 2023, providing an operational capacity of 600 petahash per second, bringing Hut 8’s total installed hashrate to 3.2 hexahashes per second.
A quarterly hosting agreement has been signed for 6,400 miners in North Bay, and Hut 8 plans to renew the agreement monthly. Previously, Hut 8 had moved 988 miners from North Bay to the Medicine Hat facility in Alberta, Canada, as of March 2023.
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Hut 8 CEO Jaime Leverton also focused on the current context of the cryptocurrency mining ecosystem in light of the challenging market conditions that have prevailed for nearly 18 months:
“The industry has rebounded well in recent months and we’ve seen more momentum than initially anticipated, partly because some of our peers are following our lead in the HPC and AI computing arenas.”
Artificial intelligence and high-performance computing continue to attract attention and investment. Palo Alto-based company Inflection AI raised $1.8 billion led by Microsoft and Nvidia; part of the investment went into building a 22,000-unit Nvidia H100 Tensor GPU cluster.
Hut 8 has also started rolling out its infrastructure to power services and solutions outside of Bitcoin mining operations (bitcoin).
Leverton highlighted a new five-year agreement for the supply of IT infrastructure and hosting services to the British Columbia Health Authority and also a Case study Made with 3D productive artificial intelligence company XYZ AI.
Translation of Walter Rizzo