Riot Platforms Inc., one of the largest Bitcoin miners, said a significant portion of its operations are still offline due to damage from severe winter storms in Texas.
The company has a 750-megawatt capacity Bitcoin mining facility in Rockdale, Texas, one of the largest sites for computing power crypto mining in the world. Riot said that 17,040 of its 82,656 Bitcoin mining machines were down as a result of facility damage from severe winter storms in late December, according to an operational update on Monday.
Bitcoin miners in Texas were also affected by ice storms last week and extreme weather sent energy prices soaring, forcing some local miners to scale back operations. It’s another weather disruption hitting the industry after nearly all large-scale miners in the state unplugged their machines during a historic heat wave last summer.
The damage will also delay the Castle Rock, Colo.-based company’s plans to hit its first-quarter computing power targets.
“As previously disclosed, some sections of pipe in Buildings F and G sustained damage during severe winter storms in Texas in late December, affecting approximately 2.5 EH/s of our hash rate capacity,” the statement said. Riot CEO Jason Les in the statement. . The hash rate is a measure of computing power for Bitcoin mining operations. The company had a hash rate capacity of 9.3 exhash per second as of January 31.
Riot sold 700 coins for about $13.7 million and produced 740 in January, according to the statement.
The update comes days after Riot’s chief business officer, Chad Everett Harris, left the company. Harris served as CEO of the Texas site before it was acquired by the mining company in 2021. His departure is determined to be a termination without cause, according to a February 1 regulatory filing.
Riot shares fell as much as 6.7% in trading on Monday.
