One of the world’s largest bitcoin mining firms is buying a 50-megawatt substation in Grand Falls, N.B., as it grows operations fed by green energy.
HIVE Blockchain Technologies Ltd. is purchasing the substation and a newly built data centre as part of its acquisition of GPU Atlantic, a subsidiary of Montreal-based data centre firm GPU.One, for $25 million in stock.
The purchase is part of the Vancouver company’s strategy to acquire low-cost green energy. It operates in an industry that consumes massive amounts of electricity.
The Grand Falls facility features the substation, two fully operational data centre buildings, and low-cost electrical infrastructure that the company says is “unique to cryptocurrency mining.”
“The acquisition provides us with full ownership of a state-of-the-art and operational bitcoin mining data centre ready to deploy our incoming next generation bitcoin mining hardware with access to some of the lowest electricity costs in the industry,” Frank Holmes, executive chairman of HIVE, said in a statement.