Riot Platforms Inc., one of the largest Bitcoin miners, said a significant portion of its operations are still off-line due to damage from severe winter storms in Texas.
(Bloomberg) — Riot Platforms Inc., one of the largest Bitcoin miners, said a significant portion of its operations are still off-line due to damage from severe winter storms in Texas.
The company has a 750-megawatt capacity Bitcoin mining facility in Rockdale, Texas — one of the largest sites for crypto-mining by computing power in the world. Riot said 17,040 out of its 82,656 Bitcoin mining machines were off as a result of damage to the facility from severe winter storms in late December, according to an operational update Monday.
Bitcoin miners in Texas were also hit by ice storms last week and the extreme weather sent energy prices soaring, pushing some local miners to curtail their operations. It’s yet another weather disruption to strike the industry after almost all large-scale miners in the state unplugged their machines during a historic heat wave last summer.
The damage will also delay the Castle Rock, Colorado-based company’s plans to reach its first quarter computational power targets.
“As previously disclosed, some sections of piping in Buildings F and G were damaged during the severe winter storms in Texas in late December, impacting approximately 2.5 EH/s of our hash rate capacity,” Riot’s Chief Executive Officer Jason Les said in the statement. Hash rate is a measure of computational power for Bitcoin mining operations. The company had a hash rate capacity of 9.3 exahash per second as of Jan. 31.
Riot sold 700 coins for about $13.7 million while producing 740 in January, according to the statement.
The update comes days after Riot’s Chief Commercial Officer Chad Everett Harris left the company. Harris served as the chief executive of the Texas site before it was acquired by the mining company in 2021. His departure is determined to be a termination without cause, according to a Feb. 1 regulatory filing.
Riot’s stock tumbled as much as 6.7% in Monday trading.
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