Compass Mining to add 25,000 ASIC miners just weeks after staff cuts

cointelegraph.com:

Mere weeks after announcing staff lay-offs and salary cuts, Compass Mining has unveiled expansion plans in the form of a 75 megawatt (MW) hosting partnership with Compute North for its data center in Granbury, Texas.

The announcement on July 21 comes only a two weeks after the company retrenched 15% of its employees and implemented salary cuts for its top executives as a means to weather difficult market conditions.

It also follows the resignation of key executives including CEO Whit Gibbs and chief finance officer Jodie Fisher in late June, as well as losing one of its Maine-based hosting facilities after allegedly missing payments relating to utility bills and hosting fees.

Compass said the newest large-scale deployment will begin in August and continue for several months.

The expansion includes plans to deploy 25,000 application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners to the existing Wolf Hollow plant site in Granbury, including a variety of next generation Bitcoin miners.

According to Compass, the facility is state of the art and powered by a 1.1 gigawatt (GW) combined cycle natural gas fueled plant, which uses advanced gas turbine designs and air cooling to decrease carbon emissions and water dependence.

The data center also has a fully curtailable load and can shut down at a moment's notice should the draw on the grid exceed capacity.

This adds to existing Compass facilities across the U.S, Canada and Iceland, with major operations in Texas, Ontario, New Mexico and Florida.

Crypto miners in Texas however have had a difficult month as a result of a record-breaking heatwave in the state, which has caused a strain on the energy grid.

Major Bitcoin miners have been working with the Electric Reliability Council of Texas