Bitcoin mining company Terawulf has announced the full deployment of its 50-megawatt (MW) stake in the nuclear-powered Nautilus Cryptomine facility. The behind-the-meter bitcoin mining facility is powered by 100% nuclear power and benefits from a fixed power cost of $0.02 per kilowatt-hour (kWh), according to the company.
Terawulf Fires up 50 MW Zero-Carbon Bitcoin Mining; Aims to Reach 5.5 EH/s of Capacity by Q2 2023
Just over 45 days ago, the bitcoin mining firm Terawulf announced it had energized the Nautilus Cryptomine facility, a carbon-free data center with 24/7 baseload power stemming from the Susquehanna nuclear generation station in Pennsylvania. On April 20, 2023, the company revealed it has successfully deployed 50 MW or 1.9 exahash per second (EH/s) of hashrate. Terawulf is collaborating with Cumulus Coin, LLC, as the Nautilus Cryptomine is referred to as a “joint venture” between the two companies.
Terawulf has the option to add another 50 MW, and it plans to do so in “future phases,” the firm’s press statement explains. The company currently has 4 EH/s of hashpower with its 34,500 bitcoin mining devices. Eighteen thousand five hundred machines are located at the firm’s site in Lake Mariner, New York, and 16,000 application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners reside at the Nautilus facility. Besides the nuclear power from the Pennsylvania facility, Terawulf details that its bitcoin mining production also leverages hydro and solar at its other locations.
“Our team has been working swiftly and diligently to achieve our stated goal of reaching 5.5 EH/s of operational mining capacity in Q2 2023,” Paul Prager, the chairman and CEO of Terawulf stated on Thursday. “Deploying 50 MW of mining capacity at the Nautilus facility is an important milestone for the Company. Not only does it represent the first nuclear-powered bitcoin mining facility in the U.S., but Terawulf now has the opportunity to realize the economic advantage of 50 MW of zero-carbon mining at what is arguably the lowest contracted power cost in the sector – just $0.02/kWh for a term of five years.”
Terawulf energizing its 50-megawatt Nautilus stake comes at a time when bitcoin prices have dropped below the $29K per unit zone, down 5.7% over the last seven days. The drop has made it so BTC’s average mining costs are higher than the current spot market value, according to macromicro.me statistics. BTC miners are also contending with the network difficulty ramping up to 48.71 trillion on April 20 at block height 786,240. In less than two months, the network’s difficulty has risen more than 22% higher, putting yet another strain on mining operations.
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