Hut 8 Repays $38 Million Loan Through Stock Conversion

According to Cointelegraph, Bitcoin miner Hut 8 has settled its approximately $38 million loan from Anchorage Digital by converting the debt into common stock at $16.395 per share. This conversion price represents a 51% premium on the 20-day volume-weighted average price through September 26. Hut 8's stock opened at $12.30 on October 1. The Miner Mag reported that Hut 8 used 21,000 mining machines as collateral when it restructured the Anchorage Digital loan in February 2023. Despite this repayment, the company still holds around $290 million in debt. This includes a $150-million convertible note agreed upon in June with Coatue Management, aimed at expanding the miner's artificial intelligence computing capacity. Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot commented on the repayment, stating, "With a strengthened balance sheet and decreased leverage, we believe we are even better positioned to advance discussions with prospective counterparties and execute on the development of next-generation mining and AI data centers." Hut 8 recently announced the launch of its GPU-as-a-service program on September 26, in collaboration with AI developers AdvizeX. This program offers Hewlett Packard Enterprise supercomputers powered by a cluster of 1,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. The rise of AI and the upcoming Bitcoin halving have significantly impacted the crypto mining industry, prompting a shift of some mining power to AI and other high-performance computing sectors. Hut 8 has followed this industry trend by improving its debt-to-equity ratio, thereby lowering the cost of debt servicing and enhancing its creditworthiness. The Bitcoin network hashrate and network difficulty reached all-time highs in early September. Miami-based Hut 8 operates 10 Bitcoin mining facilities in Alberta, New York, and Texas. Additionally, it has five high-performance computing data centers in British Columbia and Ontario, Canada, and four power generation facilities in Ontario. The company closed a facility in Drumheller, Alberta, in March due to rising energy costs and outages but plans to open a power generation asset in Texas.