Iris Energy, a Bitcoin (BTC) mining company located in Australia, has said that it plans to roughly increase its mining capacity by adding thousands of mining rigs.

The company said on February 13 that it purchased an additional 4.4 exahashes per second (EH/s) of Bitmain Antminer S19j Pro ASIC miners, which increased the company’s self-mining capacity from 2.0 EH/s to 5, 5 EH/s.

Iris co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Roberts called the acquisition “a huge milestone” for the company. He also said that the current period has been “testing both for the sector and for the markets in general.”

Iris said the new miners would be located at the company’s hubs, but did not specify in which areas those hubs are located. The company operates four different sites, three of which are in British Columbia, Canada, and one in the US state of Texas.

“Without any additional monetary expenditure,” the acquisition of the machines was made possible by using the company’s leftover prepayments totaling $67 million to ASIC miner maker Bitmain.

Iris had a deal with Bitmain for 10 EH/s, however, the company claims the deal “has been fully settled, with no lingering obligations.” It was said that there are no outstanding debts.

The company has said that it is also contemplating its options regarding the sale of surplus miners that exceed its 5.5 EH/s of mining capacity to reinvest the cash.

Because the units were generating “insufficient cash flow to meet their individual debt financing commitments,” the firm was forced to pull the plug on miners that were used as collateral for a $107.8 million loan in November of last year.

Over the course of the past few months, cryptocurrency miners have come under pressure from numerous fronts. They have been forced to deal with low Bitcoin values ​​in the context of high hash rates, high mining difficulty, and high energy costs.

The pressure led publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies to sell virtually all of the BTC generated by 2022. For example, according to data provided by blockchain research firm Messari, Iris sold around 100% of the roughly 2,500 BTC he mined during that period. year.

Hashrate Index conducted research in February that found that publicly traded miners increased their production in January. The analysis also found that improving weather and steady power rates contributed to the increase in production. Iris production in January came in at 172 BTC, which is an increase from the December total of 123 BTC.