Riot Platforms Sells $161M in Bitcoin in December as it Shifts Strategy

Riot Platforms sold 1,818 Bitcoin in December for $161.6 million at an average net price of $88,870, as part of a strategy shift from Bitcoin mining to monetizing its power and data center infrastructure, including support for artificial intelligence workloads, the company said Tuesday.

As of Dec. 31, the company held 18,005 Bitcoin (BTC), including 3,977 restricted BTC, down from 19,368 Bitcoin at the end of November, while producing 460 Bitcoin during the month.

Restricted Bitcoin refers to BTC that the company owns but has pledged as collateral under its debt facilities and holds in a segregated custody account, according to its regulatory filings.

Riot also said the December report will be its final monthly production and operations update as the company shifts to quarterly disclosures focused on overall business performance, data center strategy and progress, and Bitcoin mining.

In October, the company said Bitcoin mining was no longer its end goal, outlining plans to repurpose its power infrastructure to support a proposed 1-gigawatt AI data center campus.

According to data from Bitcointreasuries.net, Riot ranks seventh among publicly listed companies by Bitcoin holdings.

Related: Bitcoin miner using compute heat to supplement Canadian greenhouses

AI, technology companies deepen ties with Bitcoin miners 

As the cost of mining Bitcoin has risen following the April 2024 halving, which cut block rewards in half, miners have increasingly looked beyond BTC production for additional revenue. One of the most significant areas of interest has been artificial intelligence computing.

Because Bitcoin miners operate energy-dense data centers and large-scale power infrastructure, the sector has attracted growing attention from AI and technology companies seeking access to electricity and high-performance computing capacity.

In August, Google became the largest shareholder of TeraWulf, holding about 14% of outstanding shares, after expanding a financial backstop tied to the miner. The backstop supports a 10-year colocation lease with Fluidstack, under which TeraWulf will supply data center capacity for artificial intelligence workloads.

A month later, Google acquired a 5.4% stake in Cipher Mining as part of a $3 billion, multi-year data center agreement involving Fluidstack, with Google guaranteeing $1.4 billion of Fluidstack’s obligations under a 10-year contract to lease computing capacity from Cipher.

In November, IREN signed a five-year, $9.7 billion GPU cloud services agreement with Microsoft to host Nvidia GB300 GPUs in its data centers. The same month, the top Bitcoin miner by market cap announced a $5.8 billion deal with Dell Technologies to acquire GPUs and related equipment to support the deployment.

Magazine: Bitget’s Gracy Chen is looking for ‘entrepreneurs, not wantrepreneurs’