Bitcoin miners rolled out quarterly results this week as bitcoin continued knocking off new record highs in the wake of the U.S. elections. Hut 8 cleared estimates and continues to expand into the artificial intelligence industry. HIVE Digital climbed on its mixed report. MARA Holdings, HIVE and nHut 8 all received price target hikes from analysts and shares rallied premarket on Thursday.
Meanwhile, bitcoin traded around $91,150 early Thursday, just off Wednesday afternoon's new record high of $93,445. The world's largest cryptocurrency has soared 156% over the past 12 months..
Hut 8
Hut 8 reported earnings of 1 cent per share, improved from a loss of 10 cents per share last year. Revenue leapt 101% to $43.74 million.
FactSet expected a loss of 28 cents per share on $34.6 million in revenue.
Hut 8 mined 234 bitcoin during the quarter with an average revenue per coin of $61,025, compared to the mining cost of $31,482. The company held 9,106 bitcoin in reserve with a market value of $576.5 million at quarter-end. Hut 8 during the quarter also launched its GPU-as-a-Service business through its subsidiary, Highrise AI. The company has a five-year agreement with an AI cloud services provider, which includes fixed infrastructure payments and revenue-sharing.
Hut 8 also noted that its development pipeline exceeds 5 gigawatts. CEO Asher Genoot said that three of the projects in the pipeline are "particularly promising large-scale AI data center projects." Collectively, the projects represent over 430 megawatts of capacity, which is expected to be available before the end of 2025. Meanwhile, the company is exploring commercial structures for the projects across a range of customer profiles.
Meanwhile, Hut 8 is upgrading its ASIC bitcoin mining fleet, which it estimates should improve efficiency by 37%. The upgrades should begin in Q1 2025 and could be completed as early as the second quarter.
H.C. Wainwright early Thursday hoisted Hut 8's 12-month price target to 35, from 26. The note kept a buy rating on the stock, expecting incremental increases in the revenue base across 2025.
HUT stock rallied 5% in Thursday's premarket trade. Shares are up 57% in November.
HIVE Digital
Hive Digital's loss improved to 6 cents per share from 29 cents per share last year, beating analyst estimates for a 9 cent loss. Revenue ticked down 0.5% to $22.65 million, missing FactSet expectations for $25 million.
Revenue from digital currency mining fell 7.8% to $20.77 million. High performance computing revenue leapt to $1.88 million from $253,000 last year.
Hive Digital mined 340 bitcoin during the quarter, with a total bitcoin holding of 2,604 coins with $165.2 million at quarter-end.
Canaccord raised Hive's price target to 7, from 6. H.C. Wainwright ratcheted its target to 8 from 5. The Wainwright report noted HIVE's mining capacity was set to double by summer 2025, and projected that a large artificial intelligence deal was imminent.
HIVE stock jumped 5% premarket on Thursday. Shares are up 3% so far this year, but with a 27% gain in November.
MARA Holdings
MARA Holdings reported a loss of 42 cents per share, widening from a loss of 34 cents last year and missing FactSet estimates for a loss of 26 cents. Revenue increased 35% to $131.6 million, but fell short of expectations for $140.3 million.
MARA held 26,747 bitcoin on its balance sheet at the end of the quarter. The company produced 2,070 bitcoin during Q3 and purchased another 6,210. MARA purchased 4,144 of the acquired bitcoin using proceeds from a $300 million convertible note offering, with an average price of $59,500 per bitcoin.
The company's mining fleet also increased by 7% to 268,000 miners. MARA did not sell any bitcoin during the quarter.
MARA stock climbed 3.5% before the start of regular trade on Thursday. Shares vaulted nearly 32% to start the week as bitcoin hit new record highs.
MARA stock is now down almost 8% in 2024.
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