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North American mining company Hut8 sees new demand for AI and HPC as it hopes to restart about 6,400 rigs moving from an idle site in Ontario’s North Bay.
As previously reported, Hut8 is in a legal battle with its third-party energy supplier Validus Power over alleged contractual default. Work at the facility has been suspended as of November 2022.
Hut8 declined to comment on the litigation in a correspondence with Cointelegraph, but confirmed that about 6,400 miners are moving to Texas as the company looks to get its idle hardware back into production.
The firm expects this particular batch of miners to be up and running by the end of July 2023, delivering 600 PH/s operating power, which will increase Hut8’s total installed hash rate to 3.2 EH/s.
A three-month agreement has been agreed to host 6,400 miners from North Bay, and Hut8 plans to renew the agreement on a monthly basis. Hut8 previously moved 988 North Bay miners to its facility at Medicine Hat in Alberta, Canada in March 2023.
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Hut8 CEO Jaime Leverton also touched on the current state of the cryptocurrency mining ecosystem instead of the tough market conditions that have prevailed for about 18 months:
“Over the past few months, the industry has rebounded significantly and we have seen more momentum than originally anticipated, in part because some of our peers have followed our lead in HPC and AI computing.”
Artificial intelligence and high performance computing continue to gain attention and attract investment. Companies such as Palo Alto-based Inflection AI have raised $1.8 billion led by Microsoft and Nvidia, with part of the investment directed towards building an Nvidia H100 Tensor GPU cluster with 22,000 powerful GPUs.
Hut8 has also begun rolling out its infrastructure to provide services and solutions outside of its Bitcoin mining operations.
Leverton spoke about a new five-year agreement to provide computer infrastructure and hosting services to the British Columbia Department of the Interior, as well as a case study with 3D generative artificial intelligence firm XYZ AI.