The Bitcoin miner sold 1,818 BTC and announced it would stop giving monthly production updates as it moves to a bigger data centre and infrastructure approach.
Riot Platforms sold 1,818 Bitcoin in December for $161.6 million, or an average net price of $88,870. The business said on Tuesday that this was part of a shift in strategy from mining Bitcoin to making money from its power and data centre infrastructure, which includes supporting AI workloads.
The corporation had 18,005 Bitcoin (BTC $90,849) as of December 31, including 3,977 restricted BTC. This was down from 19,368 Bitcoin at the end of November, when it mined 460 Bitcoin.
According to its regulatory filings, “restricted Bitcoin” is BTC that the company possesses but has pledged as security for its debt facilities and keeps in a separate custody account.
Riot also indicated that the December report will be the last monthly update on production and operations. The company will now only release quarterly reports that focus on overall business performance, data centre strategy and progress, and Bitcoin mining.
In October, the business announced that Bitcoin mining was no longer its main goal. Instead, it plans to use its power infrastructure to support a proposed 1-gigawatt AI data centre campus.
Bitcointreasuries.net says that Riot is the sixth largest publicly traded company in terms of Bitcoin holdings.
AI and IT businesses move closer to Bitcoin miners
After the April 2024 halving, which lowered block rewards in half, the cost of mining Bitcoin went up. Miners have been looking for ways to make more money outside of
BTC production. Computing with artificial intelligence has been one of the most interesting subjects.
Bitcoin miners run data centres and power infrastructure that use a lot of energy. This has made the industry more interesting to AI and IT businesses that want to get their hands on electricity and high-performance computing power.
In August, Google became TeraWulf’s biggest shareholder, owning around 14% of all outstanding shares. This happened when the company increased its financial backing for the miner. The backstop supports a 10-year colocation deal with Fluidstack. TeraWulf will provide data centre space for AI workloads as part of this lease.
A month later, Google bought a 5.4% share in Cypher Mining as part of a $3 billion, multi-year data centre deal with Fluidstack. Google also promised to pay $1.4 billion of Fluidstack’s obligations under a 10-year contract to lease processing capacity from Cypher.
In November, IREN struck a five-year, $9.7 billion deal with Microsoft to host Nvidia GB300 GPUs in its data centres. That same month, the biggest Bitcoin miner by market cap said it had a $5.8 billion deal with Dell Technologies to buy GPUs and other equipment to help with the deployment.