Anchorage Loan Conversion
On September 27, 2024, we entered into a Debt Repayment Agreement with Anchorage to exchange the $37.9 million outstanding balance of the Anchorage Loan (exclusive of $1.5 million of deferred financing costs) as of the agreement date for 2,313,435 shares of our common stock (the “Conversion”). Upon completion of the Conversion, the outstanding loan and all of our other related obligations, including those of our subsidiaries, under the Anchorage Loan were satisfied, and we recorded a gain on debt extinguishment of $6.0 million. See Note 10. Loans and notes payable in our Unaudited Condensed Consolidated Statements included elsewhere in this Quarterly Report for additional information.
Launch of GPU-as-a-Service Business
On September 26, 2024, we launched our GPU-as-a-Service offering as our inaugural GPU cluster came fully online under our wholly owned subsidiary Highrise AI, Inc., which has its own management team. The cluster, hosted at a tier-three data center in Chicago, Illinois, comprises multiple HPE Cray supercomputers powered by 1,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs. We have entered into a contract with an AI cloud services provider pursuant to which the provider pays us a fixed infrastructure fee and a share of its revenues from the sale of its services at the cluster.
Bitmain Partnership and Hosting Services Agreement
On September 19, 2024, we expanded our partnership with Bitmain by launching a next-generation ASIC miner. These miners will be hosted at the 205 MW Texas Panhandle site (“Vega”) through a hosting agreement with Bitmain that includes a capacity of approximately 15 EH/s. Deployment of these miners is planned for the second quarter of 2025.
The agreement includes a fixed hosting fee and provides us with an option to purchase all or a portion of the hosted machines at a set price within six months of their energization. As of the three months ended September 30, 2024, we made a $32.0 million deposit toward this purchase option.
Key Factors Affecting Our Performance
Price of Bitcoin
We primarily mine Bitcoin, which has historically experienced significant price volatility. We record revenue upon receipt of Bitcoin at its spot price at the beginning of the day (midnight UTC time), and we have also elected to adopt ASU 2023-08, effective July 1, 2023, under which Bitcoin is revalued every reporting period at fair value with changes in fair value recognized in net income, so any fluctuations in the price of Bitcoin may impact our results of operations.
During the three months ended September 30, 2024 and 2023, the price of Bitcoin ranged from approximately $49,100 to $70,000 and $24,900 to $31,900, respectively. During the nine months ended September 30, 2024 and 2023, the price of Bitcoin ranged from approximately $38,500 to $73,800 and $16,500 to $31,900, respectively.
Bitcoin network difficulty and hash rate
Bitcoin network difficulty, which varies directly with Bitcoin network hash rate, directly affects the results of our operations. We define Bitcoin network difficulty, multiplied by two to the thirty-second power (difficulty * 2˄32), as the measure of how many SHA-256d hashes, on average, are required to record a new block on the Bitcoin blockchain. The Bitcoin protocol is designed such that one block is generated, on average, every 10 minutes, no matter how much hash rate is on the network. To keep the time interval between blocks fixed at 10 minutes, the Bitcoin network adjusts its “network difficulty” every 2,016 blocks (or roughly every two weeks) such that the average number of SHA-256d hashes needed to find a new block is normalized at 10 minutes based on the time interval between blocks for the last 2,016 blocks.
For example, as Bitcoin network hash rate increases, the time interval between new blocks decreases. The Bitcoin network will then adjust its difficulty upward to require more hashes, on average, to record a new block. Network difficulty is an integer.