Miner Weekly: Pubcos Pour $5B into Bitcoin Mining Supply Chain

$3 billion+ went to bitcoin mining machines alone in 2024

This article first appeared in Miner Weekly, BlocksBridge Consulting’s weekly newsletter curating the latest news in bitcoin mining and data analysis from TheMinerMag. Subscribe to receive in your inbox once a week.

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Ten major publicly listed Bitcoin mining companies have filed earnings reports for the last quarter of 2024, shedding interesting light on how much funding they have poured into the supply chain supporting their mining activities.

The cash flow statements of 10 major U.S.-listed mining companies for 2024, including Bitdeer, Cipher, CleanSpark, Core Scientific, HIVE, Hut 8, IREN, MARA, Riot, and Terawulf, show a combined spending of $4.6 billion on general property, plant, and equipment. Including several others that have only disclosed earnings until September, their total spending mounted to $4.95 billion. This represents a fourfold increase compared to the $1.2 billion spent in 2023, following the bear market of 2022, according to data tracked by TheMinerMag.

While not every company provides a clear breakdown of deposits and purchases specifically for bitcoin mining hardware, such as ASIC miners and ancillary equipment, those that did reported spending well over $3 billion on mining hardware specifically in 2024. Due to the nature of bitcoin miner preorders, buyers typically pay deposits and down payments well ahead of the scheduled deliveries.

For example, MARA alone reported $817 million as “advances to vendors” for mining equipment last year. Likely, much of that was for Antminers, and MARA also advanced $87.5 million to Auradine for future purchases. Riot, meanwhile, specified that it made deposits and advance payments of $364.8 million to MicroBT in 2024 as part of its Whatsminer preorders.

Additionally, the 10 mining companies liquidated about $100 million worth of older-generation miners in 2024, with almost all of that trading activity taking place in the last quarter. This aligns with previous reports of mining institutions gradually phasing out older models, such as the S19j Pros and S19XPs, in their efforts to upgrade fleet efficiency and make room for newer equipment. With bitcoin’s hashprice—a measure of mining profitability—stagnating around the $50 per petahashes per second (PH/s) range, the older generation of ASIC miners is facing difficulty generating profits unless with substantially attractive electricity prices. Riot notably liquidated 19,817 S19XPs in the last quarter for proceeds of $14.3 million, implying a price of about $5 per terahashes per second (TH/s).

In any case, the total spending on and trading of mining-related property, plant, and equipment offers insight into how much bitcoin mining is supporting a broader supply chain network in the U.S. and globally. Earlier this year, the Perryman Group, an economic research firm, published a report commissioned by the Texas Blockchain Council and the Digital Chamber of Commerce. The report estimates that bitcoin mining has created over 31,000 jobs and generated more than $4.1 billion in gross product annually for the U.S. economy.

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