According to reports in the Chinese news media, a person close to the crypto mining giant Bitmain has divulged that the semiconductor manufacturing company has recently placed new hardware orders in the overall sum of 600,000 cryptocurrency mining machines. With these additional crypto mining chips, Bitmain is anticipated to increase its capacity by 50% in the next six months.
Bitmain is a Chinese hardware company that designs application-specific integrated circuit chips for Bitcoin mining. The firm is the world’s largest dedicated independent semiconductor foundry which ranks as one of the most profitable chipmakers in the world.
The company was facing serious problems in late 2018 because the crypto market had gone through a major bear phase. Bitcoin(BTC)trade lost more than 82% of its total gain and touched a new low of years of $3,000. This bear phase affected Bitcoin miners significantly including of course Bitmain, which reported losses of $625 million in the first quarter of 2019. However, the recent bull run in the crypto market and the rising Bitcoin price have reversed the trend.
In late 2018, the company had to shut down some operations and cut off a big chunk of its staff. But this year in July, Bitmain and its competitor Canaan Creative managed to sell 5,000 application-specific integrated circuit mining rigs (or ASICs) to the public German Bitcoin mining company, Northern Bitcoin.
This Chinese chip-making giant seems to be optimistic about the future of Bitcoin and crypto mining, and hence placed the order 600,000 new mining chips.
According to a source close to the chip manufacturer processing the order, the newly ordered chip will be of the latest 7nm model with a hash rate of 50 tera hash per second. The recent Bitmain order also comprises of 16nm model chips, the Chinese media outlet reported. In terms of hash rate, observers believe that Bitmain’s total network computing power could jump by as much as 50% after six months.
The new investment in the cryptocurrency mining chips can bring as much as $1.2 billion in profit to Bitmain which could put Bitmain’s valuation at $12 billion, per the report.
Bitmain Seeks IPO Again
As reported in the Chinese media, the Bitcoin mining giant has renewed its plan to go public for a share sale in the United States via an initial public offering, which is set to raise $300-$500 million. The listing can be expected before the beginning of 2020.
Earlier this year, the company has announced several versions of 7nm ASIC chip. For instance, 7nm ASIC chip, BM1397 to mine cryptocurrencies using the SHA256 algorithm for proof-of-work purposes i.e. Bitcoin(BTC)trade and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). The latest 7nm Antminer 17 series was announced in April.
