Bitcoin miner Iris Energy has unplugged a large majority of its miners in response to a default notice on about $107.8 million in loans they were securing.
However, the company said that its data center capacity and development pipeline will be “unaffected” by the move, in a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing Monday. It freed up about 90 megawatts of capacity at a time when machine prices have fallen steeply.
“The group continues to explore opportunities to utilize its available data center capacity, recognizing the current scarcity of industry hosting data center capacity, and the prospect of utilizing $75 million of prepayments already made to Bitmain in respect of an additional 7.5 EH/s of contracted miners for further self-mining,” Iris said in a statement.
The company had previously stated that given current mining economics the machines weren’t making enough money to pay for loans, generating around $2 million in BTC per month in gross profit, versus the $7 million in debt obligations.
Earlier this month, Iris was served with a default notice from its lender and now expects it to call back the machines.
Having turned off about 3.6 EH/s worth of machines, the company said its computing capacity is now roughly 2.4 EH/s when accounting for 1.3 EH/s of miners in transit or pending deployment and 1.1 EH/s of machines in operation.
“The Facilities were intentionally structured for prudent risk management to protect the underlying business and data center infrastructure the Group has built (i.e., without a parent company guarantee and without recourse to any other Group entities),” the company also said, adding that it has no other outstanding debt facilities.
As of Oct. 31, Iris had $53 million of cash and cash equivalents.
