Bitcoin miner Hut 8 has paid off the approximately $38 million balance of its loan from Anchorage Digital through a stock conversion. Anchorage Digital converted the debt to common stock at $16.395 per share.
The converted share price represents a 51% premium on the 20-day volume-weighted average price through Sept. 26. Hut 8 stock opened at $12.30 on Oct. 1.
Getting the books ready for AI
According to the trade publication The Miner Mag, Hut 8 used 21,000 mining machines as collateral when it restructured the Anchorage Digital loan in February 2023. The company still carries around $290 million in debt.
Hut 8’s remaining debt includes a $150-million convertible note agreed in June with Coatue Management and earmarked for the miner’s expansion into the artificial intelligence computing capacity market.
Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot said of the Anchorage Digital repayment:
“With a strengthened balance sheet and decreased leverage, we believe we are even better positioned to advance discussions with prospective counterparties and execute on the development of next-generation mining and AI data centers.”
Source: The Miner Mag
Related: Hut 8 ‘self-mining plans’ make it competitive post-halving: Benchmark
Hut 8 is well-positioned for expansion
Hut 8 announced the launch of its GPU-as-a-service program on Sept. 26 in conjunction with AI developers AdvizeX. It offers Hewlett Packard Enterprise supercomputers powered by a cluster of 1,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs.
The rise of AI and the Bitcoin halving has had a profound impact on the crypto mining industry, leading to a shift of some mining power to AI and other high-performance computing. Hut 8 has followed an industry trend in improving its debt-to-equity ratio, thus lowering the cost of debt servicing and raising creditworthiness.
Meanwhile, the Bitcoin network hashrate and network difficulty hit all-time highs in early September.
Miami-based Hut 8 has 10 Bitcoin mining facilities in Alberta, New York and Texas. It also has five high-performance computing data centers in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario and four power generation facilities in Ontario.
Hut 8 closed a facility in Drumheller, Alberta, in March, citing rising energy costs and outages. It plans to open a power generation asset in Texas.
Magazine: AI may already use more power than Bitcoin — and it threatens Bitcoin mining