THE MINING POD: ERCOT’s 266 GW Surge, IREN’s $2.3B Raise, GPUs > ASICs, Whatsminer M70
This week in bitcoin mining news, ERCOT sees a 266 GW of interconnection requests in 2026, IREN closed a $2.3 billion convertible note offering, and GPUs are leaving ASICs in the dust.
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Welcome back to The Mining Pod! Today, Ethan Vera, COO of Luxor, joins us as we dive into Whatsminer’s M70 launching into a challenging ASIC market, IREN’s $2.3 billion convertible note offering, the precarious state of hashprice, Luxor’s new GPU hardware sales business, the staggering 270% leap in ERCOT interconnection requests, and the controversial Cat bitcoin fork proposal aimed at filtering ordinals / inscriptions.
**Notes:**
- Hash price is below $40 per second
- Three negative difficulty adjustments
- Ercot requests leaped 270% in 2025
- 73% of requests from data centers
- IREN raised $2.3B in convertible notes
- M70 efficiency: 12.5 J/TH
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CleanSpark (Nasdaq: CLSK) is a market-leading data center developer with a proven track record of success. We own a portfolio of power, land, and data centers across the United States powered by globally competitive energy prices. Sitting at the intersection of Bitcoin, energy, operational excellence and capital stewardship, we optimize our infrastructure to deliver superior returns to our shareholders. Monetizing low-cost, high reliability energy by producing a global emerging critical resource – compute – positions us to prosper in an ever-changing world.
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