Mining firm BIT Mining Limited to invest millions in data center outside China

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In the wake of the imminent crackdown on blockchain mining companies in mainland China, locally based block reward miner BIT Mining Limited has announced key strategic measures intended to help it expand beyond China’s borders.

The publicly-traded company recently announced that it had entered a binding investment term sheet with Dory Creek LLC to invest in a digital currency mining facility in Texas.

BIT Mining Limited (NYSE: BTCM) will invest $25.74 million and jointly build and operate the Texas mining center with Dory Creek, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bitdeer, Inc. They expect the mining facility to have a total power capacity of 57.2 megawatts, with over 85% of its power generated by clean and low-carbon energy.

The company followed it up with another announcement that it entered a binding investment term sheet with a Kazakhstan-based partner to invest in a digital currency mining facility in Kazakhstan jointly.

Per the terms of the deal, BIT Mining Limited will invest a total amount of RMB60 million (US$9.33 million) to build and operate the Kazakhstan Mining Data Center jointly. Once construction is completed, they expect the facility to have a total power capacity of 100MW.

BIT Mining Limited will hold an 80% equity interest in the Kazakhstan facility, with the local partner holding 20%.

Alongside the construction of the new Kazakhstan facility, BIT Mining Limited also entered service agreements with two other Kazakhstan-based partners for its ASIC mining machines at a different facility.

The local Kazakhstan partners will provide BIT Mining Limited with data center services, including on-site machine hosting, broadband network support, security monitoring, server management, and support. The company expects that the total power capacity devoted to block reward mining could reach as high as 60MW at this alternate location, with access to 20MW of total power beginning on July 1, 2021.

Outside of North America, Kazakhstan was the most active BTC mining location last year for Chinese block reward miners with electricity rates allegedly as low as $0.044 per kilowatt-hour. Some online reports say that Kazakhstan already has 6% to 10% of BTC’s entire network hashrate.

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