Texas’s Crypto Mining Boom Is Starting to Look More Like a Bust

tech.hindustantimes.com:

The digital gold rush in Texas is losing its luster as Bitcoin miners grapple with financial woes, leaving behind what some fear will be a wasteland of unfinished sites and abandoned equipment.

In an effort to become a haven for crypto mining, Texas has aggressively lured miners with cheap power and favorable regulations, prompting many to take out billions in loans to buy pricey machines and build out infrastructure.

However, soaring energy costs, a sharp decline in Bitcoin prices and more competition have compressed profit margins and made it difficult for miners to repay debt. Some are on the verge of bankruptcy.

“There are just tons of assets everywhere, it's like a mess.” said Mason Jappa, chief executive at Austin, Texas-based crypto-mining service firm Blockware Solutions. “I got messages about transformers, switch gears, and mobile data centers and containers for mining, they are just sitting there.”

There are a lot of losers if the Bitcoin mining industry goes bust. For one, local authorities provided incentives such as tax abatements that reached into the tens of millions of dollars. The power generation planned that the region sorely needs to avoid another energy crisis may not materialize. Some developers made hefty investments to build out Bitcoin mining facilities. The average cost to have one-megawatt capacity of mining infrastructure is currently around $300,000 in the state, the high end of the range, according to Jappa.

Iris Energy said it would assess how much and when they will build out facilities beyond the initial 20-megawatt construction on their Childress site after closing out two facilities and defaulting on $108 million in loans. The firm planned to have 600-megawatt of capacity at the