Despite the expansion, APLD shares fell 5.3% on Friday.

Crypto mining equipment. Image: Shutterstock

Applied Digital, a blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure provider, has opened a new 200 megawatt (MW) data center in Garden City, Texas.

The facility marks the company’s third blockchain hosting facility to come online in North America.

“Once fully energized, the site will bring Applied Digital’s total blockchain hosting capacity to a planned 480MW,” the company wrote in Friday’s announcement.

A megawatt (MW) is a unit of power equal to one million watts, while a gigawatt (GW) is equal to one billion watts. Riot Blockchain is another publicly traded Bitcoin miner with a 1GW mining facility in the same state.

For context, a standard household light bulb runs at 60 watts. Meanwhile, Cambridge estimates that the entire Bitcoin network currently requires 14.83 gigawatts, up from an estimate of 12.89 gigawatts in September.

Bitcoin miners use this power to generate the hashes needed to build the network’s next block of transactions, and miners are rewarded with newly minted bitcoins.

According to Bitinfocharts, Bitcoin’s current hash rate is about 400 exahashes per second (EH/s). 1 exahash is equal to 150 billion hashes.

“Depending on the model of miner, the facility will support 7-8.5 EH,” Wes Cummins, chairman and CEO of Applied Digital, told reporters.

However, none of this computing power is intended for the company itself. Cummins said his company only hosts “other miners,” meaning other companies that own rigs that the company stores and operates on their behalf. This business earned Applied Digital $22 million in revenue in the quarter ended May 2023.

However, like many mining companies, Applied Digital is shifting its focus from bitcoin mining to high-performance computing (HPC) — another energy-intensive service that supports the artificial intelligence industry.

Like mining, high-performance computing requires large data centers, cooling systems and cheap energy to be profitable. Adam Sharp, director of digital research at HIVE, said HPC cloud services are "far more profitable per unit of energy than bitcoin mining."

“We are focusing all of our new expansion on HPC/AI workloads,” Allied’s Cummins said.

But investors don’t seem convinced — at least not yet. Applied Digital shares, which trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker APLD, fell 5.3% on Friday. #人工智能  #比特币挖矿