Sphere 3D, the data management firm that is merging with bitcoin miner Gryphon Digital Mining, has signed a deal with mining computer maker NuMiner Technologies to purchase 60,000 its high-end NM440 machines for $1.7 billion.
Sphere 3D will fund the deal with about $400 million of capital stock, $29 million in cash, an option to utilize up to $1.1 billion in vendor purchase financing and up to $185 million of additional milestone payments, according to a statement.
Sphere 3D expects to go public in the first quarter of this year.
NuMiner said that its NM440 mining computers have 440 terahash per second (TH/s) of mining power and power efficiency of 20.2 joules per terahash (J/TH), according to a separate statement. This makes the miners the most powerful and efficient mining machines currently on the market. In comparison, Bitmain’s most recent offering, the Antminer S19 Pro+ Hyd., has a hashrate of 198 TH/s and efficiency of 27.5 (J/TH).
“The NM440 boasts a 440 TH/s processing hash rate, more than 8x the average bitcoin miner, with ~75% less energy usage, as substantiated by leading third-party testing company TÜV Nord’s certified lab BTL,” said Anthony Melman, chair of NuMiner’s global board of directors. Melman was also appointed to Sphere 3D’s board of directors, effective March 2022.
The deal for 60,000 miners for roughly $1.7 billion will make the NM440 models’ pricing around $28,000 each. The miners are being produced in coordination with leading technology suppliers, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Foxconn and Xilinx, according to NuMiner’s statement. Deliveries will start in the second quarter of 2022.
Sphere 3D said that the deal puts the company on pace to be one of the “largest carbon neutral bitcoin miners,” as contracted deliveries of all the miners would represent a total hashrate of 32.4 exahash per second (EH/s) if fully deployed today. The Bitcoin network’s total hashrate was about 202 EH/s as of Feb. 2, according to data analytics firm Glassnode.
By comparison, Marathon Digital, one of the largest publicly traded miners, said on Jan. 3 that its computing hashrate was 3.5 EH/s and that it planned to increase that figure to 23.3 EH/s by early 2023.
