Texas-based bitcoin mining giant Riot has exercised a purchase option with Chinese miner manufacturer MicroBT to buy another 18 EH/s of the WhatsMiners M66S model for $290.5 million, or $16/TH/s.
Riot announced the transaction on Monday, which marks the single largest hashrate purchase this year so far. In addition, Riot said it has secured further options to buy up to an additional 75 EH/s from MicroBT in a potential plan to exceed 100 EH/s in proprietary hashrate capacity.
The purchase of 66,560 units of MicroBT’s WhatsMiner M66S is also the largest order of hashrate in Riot’s history, Riot’s CEO Jason Les said in the release. It adds to the previously announced 33,280 miners (7.8 EH/s) that Riot preordered in June.
According to shipment records seen by TheMinerMag, MicroBT’s U.S. manufacturing partner Synos Corp has been importing significant amounts of bitcoin ASICs, server and computer parts over the past three months.
Riot said that the deployment for the initially purchased 7.8 EH/s will take place in Q1 2024 ahead of the halving while the delivery and installment for the new purchases will commence in the second half of 2024.
Riot joins a list of publicly traded mining companies that have in total made purchase orders of more than 40 EH/s over the past two months. The company’s stock jumps 10.46% during pre-market hours on Monday.