Genesis Digital Assets buys another 20,000 bitcoin miners from Canaan

Iceland-headquartered bitcoin mining firm Genesis Digital Assets has placed a purchase order for another 20,000 units of bitcoin ASIC miners from Canaan Creative.

The firm said in an announcement on Tuesday that in addition to the 20,000 units, it has been granted by Canaan an option to buy up to 180,000 new units of its mining equipment. That, if executed, would be the largest known amount of bitcoin miners purchased in a single order ever. The new deal also follows a $93 million order that Genesis Digital Assets bought with Canaan in April.

The parties did not specify the model of the newly purchased machines or the dollar amount in the deal.

Abdumalik Mirakhmedov, co-founder and executive chairman of Genesis Digital Assets, said the new orders are part of the firm's expansion in North American and the Nordics using renewable energy.

"These new machines will dramatically increase our capacity as we work towards our goal to increase our capacity to 1.4 gigawatts by the end of 2023," he said.

Genesis Digital Assets' predecessor was Genesis Mining, which was founded by Marco Streng and Marco Krohn in 2013 as a cloud mining business with facilities in Iceland. 

In 2017, Streng and Krohn started a self-mining business together with Mirakhmedov and two other partners Andrey Kim, and Rashit Makhat. But they didn't formally launch the self-mining operation until earlier this year when they sought funding and closed a $125 million round.

The bitcoin mining firm said, as of August, its mining capacity was over 170 megawatts with 3.1 exahashes of computing power. 

Genesis Mining recently won a legal case in China over the claim of nearly half a million GPU crypto miners, ending a multi-year lawsuit in once the world's largest crypto mining hub.