A war is brewing among states to attract bitcoin miners, and new data shows that a whole lot of them are headed to New York, Kentucky, Georgia, and Texas.
Within the U.S., 19.9% of bitcoin’s hashrate – that is, the collective computing power of miners – is in New York, 18.7% in Kentucky, 17.3% is in Georgia, and 14% in Texas, according to Foundry USA, which is the biggest mining pool in North America and the fifth-largest globally.
A mining pool lets a single miner combine its hashing power with thousands of other miners all over the world, and there are dozens from which to choose.
“This is the first time we’ve actually had state-level insight on where miners are, unless you wanted to go cobble through all the public filings and try to figure it out that way,” said Nic Carter, co-founder of Castle Island Ventures, who presented Foundry’s data at the Texas Blockchain Summit in Austin on Friday. “This is a much more efficient way of figuring out where mining occurs in America.”
But as Carter points out, the Foundry dataset does not account for all of the U.S. mining hashrate, since not all U.S.-based mining farms enlist the services of this pool. Riot Blockchain, for example, is one of the largest publicly-traded mining companies in America, with a huge presence in Texas. They don’t use Foundry, so their hashrate is not accounted for in this dataset – which is part of the reason why Texas’ mining presence is understated.
Though the dataset only captures a portion of the country’s domestic mining market, it does point to nationwide trends that are reshaping the debate around carbon’s footprint.
Many of the states ranking the highest are epicenters of renewable energy, a fact which has already begun to recast the narrative among skeptics that bitcoin is bad for the environment.
While Carter acknowledges that U.S. mining isn’t wholly renewable, he does say that miners here are much better about selecting renewables and buying offsets.
“The migration is definitely a net positive overall,” he said. “Hashrate moving to the U.S. will mean much lower carbon intensity.”
Where did all the miners go
When Beijing decided to kick out all its crypto miners this spring, about half of the bitcoin network went dark practically overnight. While the network itself didn’t skip a beat, the incident did set off the biggest migration of bitcoin miners ever seen.
The Foundry dataset shows the biggest bitcoin mining operations are in some of the states with the most renewable – a game changer for the debate around bitcoin’s environmental impact.
Because miners at scale compete in a low-margin industry, where their only variable cost is typically energy, they are incentivized to migrate to the world’s cheapest sources of power – which also tend to be renewable.
New York counts its nuclear power plants toward its 100% carbon free electricity goal, and critically, New York produces more hydroelectric power than any other state east of the Rocky Mountains. It was the third-largest producer of hydroelectricity in the nation, as well.
New York’s chilly climate – plus its previously abandoned industrial infrastructure ripe for repurposing – have also made it an ideal spot for bitcoin mining.
Crypto mining company Coinmint, for example, operates facilities in New York, including one in a former Alcoa Aluminum smelter in Massena, which taps into the area’s abundant wind power, plus the cheap electricity produced from the dams that line the St. Lawrence River. The Massena site, at 435 megawatts of transformer capacity, is billed as one of – if not the – largest bitcoin mining facility in the U.S.
New York was weighing legislation this year to ban bitcoin mining for three years so it could run an environmental assessment to gauge its greenhouse gas emissions. Lawmakers have since largely walked it back.
“Bitcoin mining in New York is actually very low in carbon intensity, given its hydro power, and, as a consequence, if New York were to ban bitcoin in-state, it would probably raise the carbon intensity of the bitcoin network overall,” said Carter. “It would be the complete opposite of what they wanted.”
Other states capturing a large share of America’s bitcoin mining industry include Kentucky and Georgia.
Beyond the fact that Kentucky’s governor is friendly to the industry, having just passed a law this year that grants certain tax exemptions to crypto mining operations, the state is also known for its hydroelectric and wind power.
Connecting rigs to otherwise stranded energy, like natural gas wells, is another power source. Although coal is also a big player in the energy mix, many mining operations there gravitate to renewables.
And then there’s Texas
Texas may rank fourth according to Foundry’s data set, but many experts believe there is no question that it is the leading jurisdiction for miners right now.
Some of the biggest names in bitcoin mining have set up shop in Texas, including Riot Blockchain, which has a 100-acre site in Rockdale, and Chinese miner Bitdeer, which is right down the road.
Orders for new ASICs – the specialty gear used to mint new bitcoin – show that tens of thousands more machines are due to be delivered in Texas, according to The Block Crypto.
The appeal of Texas comes down to a few big fundamentals: Crypto-friendly lawmakers, a deregulated power grid with real-time spot pricing, and perhaps most importantly, access to significant excess energy which is renewable, as well as stranded or flared natural gas.
The regulatory red carpet being rolled out for miners also makes the industry very predictable, according to Alex Brammer of Luxor Mining, a cryptocurrency pool built for advanced miners.
“It is a very attractive environment for miners to deploy large amounts of capital in,” he said. “The sheer number of land deals and power purchase agreements that are in various stages of negotiation is enormous.”
Some miners plug straight into the grid in order to power their rigs. ERCOT, the organization that operates Texas’ grid, has the cheapest utility-scale solar in the nation at 2.8 cents per kilowatt hour. The grid is also rapidly adding wind and solar power.
“You just can’t beat the cost of power in West Texas, and when you couple that with a skilled power management company that can manage your demand response programs, it’s almost unbeatable anywhere else in the world,” continued Brammer.
Deregulated grids tend to have the best economics for miners, because they can buy spot energy.
“They can participate in economic dispatch, which means that they stop buying electricity when prices get high, so you have far more flexibility if you are active in the spot markets,” explained Carter.
Another major energy trend in the bitcoin mining business in Texas is using “stranded” natural gas to power rigs, which both reduces greenhouse gas emissions and makes money for the gas providers, as well as the miners.
Carter says that if this is fully exploited, flared gas in Texas alone could power 34% of the bitcoin network today – which would make Texas not only the clear leader in bitcoin mining in the U.S., but in the world.
Amazon said Tuesday it received regulatory approval to begin flying a smaller, quieter version of its delivery drone, the latest step in its long-running efforts to get the futuristic program off the ground.
The company unveiled the new drone, called the MK30, in November 2022. It said then that the MK30, in addition to the other changes, would fly through light rain and have twice the range of earlier models.
Amazon said the Federal Aviation Administration’s approval includes permission to fly the MK30 over longer distances and beyond the visual line of sight of pilots. The agency granted a similar waiver for Amazon’s Prime Air program in May, though that was limited to flights in College Station, Texas, one of the cities where it has been conducting tests.
Alongside the FAA approval, Matt McCardle, head of regulatory affairs for Prime Air, said the company is starting to make drone deliveries Tuesday near Phoenix, Arizona. In April, Amazon said it planned to spin up drone operations in Tolleson, a city west of Phoenix, after it shut down an earlier test site in Lockeford, California. The company will dispatch the drones near one of its warehouses in Tolleson as it looks to integrate Prime Air more closely into its existing logistics network and further speed up deliveries.
An FAA spokesperson said the agency granted Amazon permission to conduct beyond visual line of sight deliveries in Tolleson on Oct. 31.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos first unveiled plans for the ambitious service more than a decade ago, remarking at the time that the program could be up and running within five years. Despite Amazon investing billions of dollars into the program, progress has been slow. Prime Air encountered regulatory hurdles, missed deadlines and had layoffs last year, coinciding with widespread cost-cutting efforts by CEO Andy Jassy. The program also lost some key executives, including its primary liaison with the FAA and its founding leader. Amazon hired former Boeing executive David Carbon to run the operation.
It’s also encountered pushback from some residents in the cities where it’s trialing drone deliveries. Residents in College Station complained about the noise levels enough that it prompted the city’s mayor to mention the concerns in a letter to the FAA, CNBC previously reported. In response, Amazon executives told residents the company would identify a new drone delivery launch site by October 2025.
Amazon isn’t the only company trying to crack delivery by drone. It’s competing with Wing, owned by Google parent Alphabet, UPS, Walmart and a host of startups including Zipline and Matternet.
Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp appears on a Bloomberg television interview during the FoundryCon event in Palo Alto, California, on March 7, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Palantir shares jumped 23% on Tuesday and headed for a record close after the data analytics software maker reported robust third-quarter results and issued uplifting revenue guidance.
The stock reached a high of $51.19, above the prior record of $45.14 reached last week. If the gain holds, it will mark the stock’s biggest jump since Feb. 6, when shares popped 30%.
Revenue climbed 30% to $726 million from a year earlier, topping the $701 million average analyst estimate, according to LSEG. Adjusted earnings per share of 10 cents beat the 9-cent average estimate.
Analysts at Deutsche Bank said in a report that “the beat was driven by better-than-anticipated US Government performance,” boosted by demand for artificial intelligence tools.
“Palantir is among a handful of infrastructure software companies that have started to meaningfully monetize generative AI, where its competitive positioning benefits from longtime investment and deep expertise in complex data integration, and particularly its reputation for data security built into its ontology,” the analysts wrote.
Net income of $143.5 million, or 6 cents per share, was up from $71.5 million, or 3 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago. The company called for fourth-quarter revenue of $767 million to $771 million. Analysts surveyed by LSEG had been looking for $741.4 million.
Palantir is targeting more than $687 million in U.S. commercial revenue for the year, implying about 24% of the total.
Bank of America bumped its price target from $50 to $55 and maintained its buy rating.
“We continue to view the adoption of PLTR’s AI-enabled products and reach in its early days, as more companies realize the time, resource, and cost savings possible,” Bank of America analysts wrote in a note to investors. “In our view, Palantir’s moat as the differentiated agnostic AI-enabler is only growing with each new use-case carrying compounding unit economics.”
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet and Michael Bloom contributed to this report.
The former head of Meta’s Orion augmented reality glasses initiative has joined OpenAI to lead the startup’s robotics and consumer hardware efforts.
Caitlin “CK” Kalinowski announced her new role Monday in a post on LinkedIn and X, writing, “In my new role, I will initially focus on OpenAI’s robotics work and partnerships to help bring AI into the physical world and unlock its benefits for humanity.”
OpenAI has gained popularity for its viral chatbot, ChatGPT, but the hiring underscores its apparent efforts to move into building and selling hardware. Former Apple exec Jony Ive, who helped design some of Apple’s most iconic products from the iMac to the iPhone, has also partnered with OpenAI to create an AI device.
The announcement came the same day as that of OpenAI’s investment into Physical Intelligence, a robot startup based in San Francisco, which raised $400 million at a $2.4 billion post-money valuation. Other investors included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Thrive Capital, Lux Capital and Bond Capital.
The startup focuses on “bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world,” per its website, and it aims to do this by developing large-scale artificial intelligence models and algorithms to power robots.
Before the new role at OpenAI, Kalinowski was a hardware executive at Meta for nearly two and a half years leading the company’s creation of Orion, previously codenamed Project Nazare, which it billed as “the most advanced pair of AR glasses ever made.” Meta unveiled its prototype glasses in September.
Before leading the Orion project, Kalinowski worked for more than nine years on virtual reality headsets at Meta-owned Oculus, and before that, nearly six years at Apple helping to design MacBooks, including Pro and Air models.
Kalinowski’s first day on the job at OpenAI is Tuesday, Nov. 5, per a LinkedIn post.