Bitcoin miners pouring $3.6 billion into hardware, data centers, and infrastructure this year.
This spending spree is almost at the record levels we saw back in the first quarter of 2022.
A big comeback
Since the start of 2024, publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies have collectively shelled out more than $3.6 billion on property, plant, and equipment.
This includes everything from new mining rigs to upgrades for data centers, basically, all the tech needed to keep their operations running.
TheMinerMag’s fresh newsletter reported that the investments made between July and September 2024 were the highest since Q1 2022 when miners spent $1.246 billion.
But in this year, in Q3 alone, they dropped about $1.226 billion, just shy of that record.
And if CleanSpark releases its financial report soon, analysts think it might push this quarter’s spending over the top!
Hardware spending dominates
In total, Bitcoin miners have invested around $3.49 billion in equipment and upgrades this year, as they spent $1.18 billion from January to March and another $1.07 billion from April to June, plus the recent Q3 figure.
That’s nearly $900 million more than what the entire sector spent throughout 2022! And there is the Q4.
After a quiet 2023 these numbers are pretty nice. In that year miners only invested about $1.3 billion in PP&E.
The increase coincides with a rise in Bitcoin’s hashrate, which recently hit nearly 790 EH/s. Plus, mining difficulty reached an all-time high of 101.6 trillion on November 5, with expectations for it to climb even higher soon.
Between July 2023 and March 2024, miners committed over $2 billion to purchase the latest generation Bitcoin mining machines, with deliveries expected to start rolling in by September 2024, but they were delayed.
Speculation is swirling about whether these delays are linked to ongoing geopolitical tensions between China and USA.
If any connections are confirmed, it could spell trouble for the multi-billion dollar Bitcoin mining industry, especially as Bitcoin approaches the $100,000 milestone.
New trends
Interestingly, while equity financing has slowed down, only raising $813 million in Q3 compared to $1.6 billion in Q2, debt financing is on the rise.
Miners raised about $500 million in Q3 alone, and this is the highest single-quarter debt issuance since early 2022.
