Hive Digital sales up 36% as Bitcoin miner forays into AI compute

Hive Digital Technologies Ltd. (HIVE) notched a 36% uptick in sales in the second quarter of 2024 as the Canadian Bitcoin miner diversifies into providing computational power to artificial intelligence (AI) applications, according an Aug. 13 filing.

Hive reported second-quarter 2024 revenues of around $32 million, compared to some $23.5 million the year prior, the company said. Much of those gains came from Hive’s core cryptocurrency mining business. The company also scaled its new high-performance computing platform to around $2.6 million in sales.

On July 12, 2023, the company changed its name from Hive Blockchain Technologies to Hive Digital Technologies to reflect a pivot to hosting AI and other advanced applications. The shift was an effort to cash in on the company’s large inventory of Nvidia graphics processing unit (GPU) cards, Hive said.

Although Hive “expects to maintain a strong presence in Bitcoin mining,” the company “will diversify its business by utilizing its Nvidia GPU-based cards to build high-performance computing clusters [...] that can provide computational power on a massive scale, notably for AI compute applications,” the company said in a statement.

Hive is also “branching out into the rental of GPU server clusters via marketplace aggregators and is exploring the development of a new cloud service offering,” the company said. Hive operates nine data centers in Canada, Sweden and Iceland.

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine — which disrupted energy supplies in Europe — could adversely affect Hive’s Swedish operations, the company said, adding that “the increased energy prices across Europe resulting from the conflict have been buffered partially by HIVE having forward energy agreements for the purchase of electricity.”

Bitcoin miners such as Hive have been adjusting business models to account for the Bitcoin network’s April 20 “halving” event, which reduced mining rewards from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC per 210,000 blocks. The industry also struggles to navigate BTC’s extreme price volatility.

Singapore-based Bitdeer has been investing in next-generation equipment to improve mining efficiency. In 2022, Bitcoin miner Argo Blockchain sold its Helios Bitcoin mining facility in Dickens County, Texas, to asset manager Galaxy Digital for $65 million.