$5 Billion in AI Pivots, 20M BTC Mined, and Africa Wants Miners [NEWS]

All right, welcome back.

Happy Monday, this is Hashtag up,

a bit of a news roundup from last week.

We are recording at 940407.

We are currently 41 blocks too slow on this fine Thursday,

where it is very, very hot in South Africa,

and I'm sweating just standing here.

It's March 12th, so eight days

until the difficulty adjustment comes in

at a nice minus 4%.

Minus around the world are rejoicing.

We are still sitting at 3059 hash price.

And I just wanted to share some of the new stories

that peaked my interest last week

and get you guys started the right way.

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First up, we have Nscale raising

$2 billion for AI infrastructure expansion

with NVIDIA and Jane Street.

Backing Nscale, formerly a spin-off

or a spin-off out of Bitcoin mining company,

Archon Energy.

We see very noticeable names in this series

C funding, Citadel, Dell, Jane Street, Lenovo, Nokia,

NVIDIA, so all these big companies,

you know, pushing their money

or pushing their capital into the AI pivot

and looking for those companies

who have access to power, access to PPAs

are not held back by the grid constraints.

We see noticeable names also on their board

for my meta-chief operating officer, Cheryl Sandberg,

former Yahoo president Susan Decker

and former UK deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg,

joining board of directors at the company.

And again, I've highlighted the Bitcoin part here.

The Nscale roots trace back to the Bitcoin mining industry.

The company was spun out of crypto infrastructure

operator Archon Energy in 2024,

part of a broader wave of firms repurposing expertise,

developed in power intensive Bitcoin mining towards

the fast growing market for AI compute.

So it's not just power infrastructure,

but it's also knowledge, you know,

how to handle these big power contracts

and everything around that,

that make these companies that were firmly into Bitcoin

very attractive for this pivot to AI,

very attractive to this capital.

Now, last week we saw the 20th million Bitcoin

mined, it took 16 years for the first 20 million.

It'll take another decade for the last million

to be mined for the last 5%.

Bitcoin is becoming extremely scarce.

And I have my doubts that the wider market

even understands how this works

or how scarce Bitcoin really is going to be.

And I think we're going to see a lot of scrambling for sets.

So for the next couple decades as more and more people

realize how valuable Bitcoin really is

and how scarce it has become.

BitX, solo mining.de got it.

Premium made in Germany.

You want to go fancy, go for NERDEX

or NERDE QX plus plus for a lot of power.

Worldwide shipping, check out solo mining.de today.

Next up, a very interesting story for me

when it comes to mining foundry expands

into Zcash mining pool as Bitcoin hash price slides.

This is interesting because it sort of

tells the broader story of how the market currently works,

right, we have 30 dollar hash price.

Big minus negotiate low fees.

It's a raise to the bottom on that front

because the FPS pools really provide

very similar services.

And then you have dollar denominated costs.

You've got wages, you've got lawyer costs,

you've got infrastructure costs,

all denominated and dollars.

And the hash price is at 30.

Also the pools are sweating because now the percentage

of the Bitcoin mind on their pool is worth less

and they have to make you with less as well.

So now foundry, one of the biggest mining pools

that we have out of the US is looking at Zcash,

becoming a Zcash mining pool.

Next up, Google Backstop, Backstop,

TerraWolf shift from Bitcoin to AI infrastructure.

Google has agreed to provide 3.2 billion credit

backstop to TerraWolf and take an equity stake

in the company.

Again, another huge name jumping into a company

that was formerly all Bitcoin mining.

Very interesting.

Take this with a grain of salt.

It's probably written by AI and was reviewed

by Bayley Pempetent at Simply Wall Street.

Now, my favorite story for last week was the following.

Eskom has big Bitcoin plan in South Africa.

Eskom, the biggest and only power distributor

and power generator.

I'm not sure if it's the only one

depending on municipality, but power generation

and distribution in South Africa is a monopoly

by Eskom, Eskom is the state owned company that runs that

and they have now said that they want to sell surplus,

they time energy to Bitcoin miners.

And I'm always a bit on the fence

when it comes to these negotiations or these deals

when governments are involved.

Because oftentimes what happens in these negotiations

is that the power producer and distributor

doesn't really understand how much money

Bitcoin miners can afford to spend.

And also they don't understand truly the position

oftentimes of being in a position

where they can either sell it for something or nothing

and oftentimes the dollar signs pop into their eyes

and then there's a bit of a reality check

where Bitcoin miners say, hey, we can maybe afford

a third of what you are envisioning.

And it's really about us being the only demand,

the demand of last resort that sets the price here

or else you can't really sell the power.

And then the fact to be added that

Bitcoin mining is a global industry

and Bitcoin miners can go anywhere.

However, I really hope this goes forward

because I would really love to start a small operation here

that makes use of Eskom power during certain hours of the day

where it comes extremely cheap.

There's a lot of surplus here.

Energy, there's a lot of grid backlog

and so this might be really, really nice going forward.

Let's see what comes of this.

I'll make sure to follow this very closely.

That being said, I hope you guys have a fantastic week.

Let me know if you like these.

See you later.