Good morning, everyone. My name is Alan, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Bitfarms second quarter 2023 financial results conference call. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touchtone phone. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, August 8th, 2023. I would like now to turn the call over to David Barnard from LHA Investor Relations. David, you may begin your conference
Great. Thank you, Alan. Welcome to Bitfarms conference call for the second quarter of 2023. With me on the call today is Geoff Morphy, President and CEO, and Jeff Lucas, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, please note, this call is being webcast live with an accompanying presentation. To watch along with the slides, you can log on to our website at www.bitfarms.com, under the Investors Presentations. If you prefer to listen to the call on your smartphone, you can download the presentation from there as well. I would like to remind you that this morning, Bitfarms issued a press release announcing its second quarter 2023 financial results. Turning to slide 2, I'll remind everyone that certain forward-looking statements will be made during the call and that future results could differ materially from those implied in these statements.
The forward-looking information is based on certain assumptions and is subject to risks and uncertainties, and I invite you to consult Bitfarms MD&A for a complete list of these. Also, during the call, reference will be made to supporting slides, and you can find the presentation again on our website at www.bitfarms.com under the Investor Relations section. This company will also refer to certain measures not recognized under IFRS and that do not have a standardized meaning prescribed by IFRS and therefore may not be comparable to similar measures presented by other companies. We invite listeners to refer to today's press release and the company's second quarter 2023 MD&A for definitions of the aforementioned non-IFRS measures and their reconciliation to IFRS measures. Please note that all financial references are denominated in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. During today's call, CEO Geoff Morphy will review our operations for the quarter.
CFO Jeff Lucas will follow with a detailed financial review, and Geoff Morphy will return for some closing remarks after the Q&A. We have also requested investors to send questions in advance, which I will read to management after we open the call to analysts interested in the live Q&A. Now it's my pleasure to turn the call over to Geoff Morphy.
Thank you for joining us today. I'll begin by emphasizing that we have built a quality portfolio of assets and the resources to manage them very effectively. Together with ongoing investments, they provide investors with excellent exposure to rising Bitcoin prices, particularly as we approach the next Bitcoin halving. To capitalize on this further, we are executing an aggressive and disciplined growth strategy to optimize overall risk returns while managing risks. Pillars of our growth strategy are responsible capital deployment, reinvestment in our fleet with the latest in miner technology, continued geographic diversification, adherence to strong financial and operating controls, audited by a Big 4 accounting firm since incorporation over five years ago, and we have the most highly experienced and accomplished team supporting our global growth.
In the past 24 months, we have expanded from 69 MW, powering 5 production facilities in Quebec, to 212 MW, energizing 11 operating farms in 4 countries. During this time, we increased our hash rate over 275% to 5.3 exahash per second. We have built an incredibly sound infrastructure to support scalable and sustainable growth, and we are now leveraging our infrastructure as we pursue current and future opportunities. I'll now review our foundation. Our farms are well-established and efficient, maximizing output while minimizing costs, leading to higher and more consistent profitability, with each location contributing positively. We excel in operations and continuously work to improve facilities and processes, including the adoption of cutting-edge technologies, to enhance efficiency and productivity, driving effective deployment of miners and fleet enhancements.
We carefully manage our capital structure, and this quarter, we further deleveraged our balance sheet by utilizing our surplus free cash flow after debt service, while still investing in growth. We ended June with only $16 million in debt, enhancing our financial flexibility to expeditiously seize upon growth opportunities and deploy capital quickly and effectively. A perfect example is our accretive expansion in Paraguay, where we acquired 150 MW of hydropower contracts in July and recently initiated deployment plans for the first 50 MW, which I'll detail in a moment. We are truly a global player with a well-diversified portfolio of production assets and management personnel. These attributes mitigates risk associated with concentrated operations in a small number of facilities in a single region. Our stellar corporate development team is actively seeking new opportunities, including expanding into new geographies, adding complementary businesses, and improving overall operations.
With just eight months until the next Bitcoin halving, the pipeline is growing. With our global footprint, sound balance sheet, and respected integrity, Bitfarms is well-positioned to take advantage of situations meeting our criteria of stable, low-cost power contracts, quick paybacks, and high return on invested capital. Simply put, our portfolio of high-quality assets offers exposure to rising Bitcoin prices, and Bitfarms leverages this inherent value with efficient operations, strong execution, financial discipline, global diversification, and a proactive approach to identify and act on opportunities, and risk management practices incorporated to safeguard against potential adverse developments. On slide 5, I'll review some of our accomplishments for Q2 2023. We ended June 2023 with 5.3 exahash per second, up 10% from March 31, 2023, and up 47% from June 30th, 2022.
Current installations in Rio Cuarto and Baie-Comeau continue, and our target for completion in September, increasing our hash rate 19% to 6.3 exahash per second. During Q2 2023, we mined 1,223 Bitcoin. With higher average Bitcoin prices, Q2 2023 revenue increased 18% from Q1 2023. We delivered Adjusted EBITDA of $8 million and increased our HODL to 594 Bitcoin at June 30th, 2023. Slide 6 shows a summary of operating capacity and installed miners for our farms. 11 operating in four countries, and we now consider our two new locations in Paraguay as farms under development. In July, we reached 212 MW in operating capacity, up 28% from a year ago. Notably, 86% is powered by sustainable hydroelectricity. I will now review our operations and development plans. Turning to slide 7.
In Paraguay, we acquired two power purchase agreements totaling 150 MW of low-cost hydropower in July that will energize two new farms. These were very strategic acquisitions because Paraguay is highly attractive for development. Based on our experience, this country has amongst the lowest build-out costs, quickest project timelines to completion, and a straightforward importation regime. Yesterday, we announced our initial deployment at our new Paso Pe farm. The Paso Pe farm will be only about 1 km away from our existing Villa Rica farm. In addition to plans for 30 MW of air-cooled facilities, we purchased MicroBT hydro-cooled miners and related containers, entirely with vendor credits, for 20 MW of deployment of this latest mining technology. We expect the new farm to be fully commissioned at 50 MW in Q1 2024. Turning to slide 8.
In Rio Cuarto, Argentina, we increased production to 29 MW as we imported and installed approximately 5,100 new M30S WhatsMiner miners. This added approximately 510 petahash per second to the facility and brought its total hash rate to approximately 700 petahash per second. We also qualified and strategically became a self-importer of miners. Doing so streamlines and lowers the cost of importing miners into the country. As of today, 4,680 additional miners have arrived and are being processed by Argentine customs. An additional 2,797 miners are in transit, and all miners are expected to be installed and running in Q3 2023, which will bring us up to 50 MW at this farm. We can provide more details on this equipment if so desired.
In Canada, we closed the purchase of the Baie-Comeau acquisition and initiated production in early July. The acquisition not only brought new production capacity, but also provided us with the opportunity to optimize our fleet by redeploying miners from Magog. This was undertaken to free up suitable rack space in Magog for higher performance miners. The Baie-Comeau farm is presently operating with 1,300 miners at 5 MW, and with the remaining miners from Magog, we should reach 11 MW in Q3 2023 as planned. This, in conjunction with the Rio Cuarto build-out that I just mentioned, gives us confidence we can achieve our 6.3 exahash per second Q3 2023 target. Regarding Magog, in July, we leveraged our assets to respond quickly to a lightning strike that took out our primary transformer.
Our proactive risk mitigation strategy handles unforeseen incidents and minimizes their impact on production and operations. By combining redundancy, geographic diversification, in-house capabilities, and spare equipment, we were able to respond swiftly and effectively to the outage, ensuring minimal disruption to our overall business. Favorably, the facility is hashing at full capacity and no miners were damaged as part of this lightning strike. In Washington State, we upgraded intake and exhaust systems, greatly improving efficiencies. The intake is now equipped with a two-stage filter, which includes an evaporative cooling component, which saves energy and reduces service requirements. The exhaust system now includes automated fans, reducing power consumption by as much as 90%. Results have been impressive. For example, deterioration of hash rate on a 100+ degree day has been limited to only 2%-3% versus approximately 30% previously.
Considering this, we are now evaluating these enhancements for use on our other farms. We continue to enhance our MGMT proprietary software. This software remains one of the longest running and robust systems in the industry. New capabilities include the precise tracking of power consumption and operating performance per miner per location. This enables greater detail on miner performance, the optimization and reconciliation of electricity consumption, and adds the predictive capability to power forecasting for all MicroBT miners, which comprise about 90% of our fleet. In summary, as we execute against our fleet expansion and upgrade plans, we are projecting 20% sequential growth in our hash rate in Q3 2023, and with Paso Pe expected to come online in Q1 2024, we are expecting to achieve 7 exahash in Q1 2024. Those are our near-term goals as we continue to evaluate other diverse, capital-efficient development opportunities.
Please turn to slide 9. With that, I will now hand over the call over to Jeff Lucas for the financial review.
Thank you, Geoff. I'll begin by highlighting, excuse me, some key elements of our financial strategy and position. We have efficient operations and stable and predictable energy rates that, with over 85% hydro, are not subject to the energy cost variability associated with fossil fuels. We have a laser focus on rapid payback of capital. We enjoy low capital requirements necessary to meet our near-term growth plan, including using our existing equipment credits to reduce the capital expenditure funding needs. We enjoy the strongest balance sheet in the history of our company, that gives us the flexibility and enables us to utilize our operational expertise to take advantage of attractive growth opportunities, and positions us well for the unpredictable economics of the halving. I will now review our mining economics, our performance, and our balance sheet. Turning to slide 10.
In the second quarter of 2023, we mined 1,223 Bitcoin, compared to 1,297 in the first quarter of 2023, and 1,257 in the second quarter of 2022. The differences reflect increases in average total network difficulty, about 24% sequentially and 67% year-over-year, offset by our hash rate, which was 10% higher sequentially and 52% higher year-over-year. Excuse me. Our second quarter revenue was $35 million, comprised of $34 million from our mining activities. This compares to $29 million from mining in the first quarter of 2023, and reflects a 24% increase in the average Bitcoin price quarter-over-quarter, partially offset by 6% fewer Bitcoin mined during the quarter. Focusing on the mining economics, we turn to slide 11 here.
In the second quarter of 2023, Bitfarms' direct cost of production per Bitcoin was under $15,700. That's up from $12,500 per Bitcoin in the first quarter of 2023. The change reflects the aforementioned increase in network difficulty and approximately 7% higher energy costs quarter-over-quarter. While we benefit from a low-cost, stable hydropower across our productive capacity in Quebec for the first time in several years, we had a rate increase that resulted in 6% higher energy costs. With Quebec representing about three-quarters of our total Q2 2023 production, the impact was significant. That said, our increasing geographic diversification paid off as the impact of rate adjustments in one jurisdiction is moderated. I'll add one more caveat for those building financial models.
Our direct cost of production since February 2022 includes a 15% accrual for value-added taxes on Canadian energy costs, reflecting proposed legislation, but which has not yet been determined or legislated. Excluding that accrual in the second quarter of 2023, our direct cost of production would have been about $14,000 per Bitcoin, $1,700 less than our reported direct cost of production. Second quarter gross mining profit was $14 million, or 42% of revenue, compared to $12 million or 42% of revenue in the first quarter. The total cash cost of production per BTC was just under $21,800 in the second quarter of 2023, up from $17,600 in Q1 2023. The largest contributor to the increase was higher and higher network difficulty, which resulted in higher energy costs per Bitcoin.
General and administrative, our G&A expenses, were also higher over the prior quarter as a result of costs associated with moving miners among our farms to optimize efficiency, higher professional service fees related to corporate development and prospective due diligence work, and business taxes in Argentina that were incurred and paid during the quarter. The quarter-over-quarter comparison also reflected benefits in the prior quarter from a one-time insurance refund. And a reversal of an accrual associated with the dismissal of noise penalties at the former De La Pointe facility in Sherbrooke. Going forward, with the halving in mind, we will continue to focus on reducing our G&A cost structure and have already identified savings in insurance and other discretionary areas. Please now turn to slide 12.
For the second quarter, our operating loss was $25 million, including non-cash depreciation expense of $21 million, and an impairment on short-term prepaid deposits and PP&E of $10 million. This compared to an operating loss of $15 million in the first quarter of 2023, including a $3 million reversal revaluation loss on digital assets, a $2 million loss in disposition of PP&E, and a $1 million realized gain on disposition of digital assets. Our net loss for the second quarter was $25 million, or $0.10 per basic and fully diluted share, compared to a net loss for the first quarter of 2023 of $2 million, or $0.01 per basic and fully diluted share.
Higher Bitcoin prices contributed to improved profitability, with Adjusted EBITDA increasing from $7 million in the first quarter of 2023 to $8 million in the second quarter of 2023. Profitability in the quarter was $6,200 per Bitcoin, versus $4,900 per Bitcoin in the first quarter of 2023. Turning to slide 13. At June 30th, we had cash of $31 million and 549 BTC, valued at $17 million, for total liquidity of $48 million. This compares to $42 million of liquidity at March 31st, 2023.
In summary, of the 1,223 Bitcoin we mined during the second quarter, we sold 1,109 to generate $31 million of proceeds to fund our operating and debt service requirements, and deposited 114 BTC in Treasury with a June month-end value of about $4 million. In July, we deposited another 45 Bitcoin to Treasury, increasing our Bitcoin in custody as of July 31st, 2023, to 594 Bitcoin. This represents a total value of approximately $17 million, based on the Bitcoin price that day of just over $29,200. In the second quarter of 2023, we also raised $22 million in net proceeds from our ATM program. For the third quarter of 2023 through August 7th, we have raised additional net proceeds of $26 million.
These monies that we raised under our ATM are specifically earmarked for the growth initiatives, which Geoff spoke about earlier. We continue to use cash generated from operations to deleverage our balance sheet. Total indebtedness was reduced to $16 million on June 30th, and to under $14 million on July 31st. As we've noted in previous earnings calls, our debt is scheduled to be fully repaid by the end of February 2024, well in advance of the halving. With that, I will now turn the call back over to Geoff.
Thank you, Jeff. Before I open the call for questions, I would like to mention some upcoming events, especially our Analyst Day on September 14th, which will begin at 8:00 A.M. at the Convene in New York City. In addition, we will be at the Canaccord 43rd Annual Growth Conference in Boston on August 9th and 10th, the 3rd annual Needham Virtual Crypto Conference on September 7th, the H.C. Wainwright Conference in New York, September 11th, 12th, and 13th, and we will also be presenting at several industry events in Europe this fall. In summary, Bitfarms remains focused on accretive and diversified growth, while further optimizing our facilities, fleet investments, and infrastructure, including the adoption of innovative technologies and practices to enhance efficiency.
Our core strengths include a competitive low-cost structure, stable and surplus sources of energy with attractive pricing, proprietary mining and facility management software, a vertically integrated electrical subsidiary, and an exceptional management team. Our growth in 2023 in advance of the halving will come with minimal capital outlay, given our full use of our MicroBT hardware credits. We expect to meet our near-term 6.3 exahash per second target before the end of September, and 7 exahash per second in Q1 2024. The first 50 MW of our 150 MW expansion in Paraguay is underway, and opportunities that meet our criteria for growth, both before and after the halving, are abundant. Operator, we can now open the call for questions. Please go ahead.
We will now begin with the question.
Just before you do it, I just got a note from David. I understand that we have a few questions from online investors. Let's handle those questions first, if you would, and then we'll go to the analysts.
Sure. Thanks, Geoff. I'll read them. There's two questions. I'll read them both at the same time, and then you can answer. One of the questions is: How greatly do you think the Bitcoin halving will impact financial results in the coming fiscal year, 2024? Then, another question, totally different: Does Bitfarms run any third-party firmware?
Ah, interesting.
Go ahead.
Okay, let's start with the halving. The halving, we've seen it before. They happen in every four years. It's gonna be a big event, and nobody's fooling anybody here is that miners that want to survive the halving need to be well prepared. We have a cost structure that is as good as anybody in the business, and as we've said in the past, we are planning to get our, our debts completely repaid so that we don't have P&I payments. We plan to get all our construction finished so that we don't have construction commitments.
We plan to get all our miners bought and installed so that we don't have CapEx commitments, so that when you go into that halving, and frankly, right now with Bitcoin prices, just below $30,000, our cost to mine a Bitcoin on a cash basis is $15,700. If we get the accrual back from the Canadian government, then it'll be $14,000. It just goes to show that that margin will quickly disappear. We all see the analyst talking about margins and how other people's costs are higher, some are lower, but some are much higher. They are going to be extremely stressed, and typically, as we've seen in the past, the adjustment to the halving takes five or six months.
I think my gut's telling me this time that it might be a little quicker because there's more adoption and more knowledge in the industry, and, you know, that four, five, six months later, Bitcoin prices go up, and then things get really exciting. In the meantime, you have to be battened down and ready for a storm, frankly. We... Take, for example, it's because of that discipline and our orientation that when Bitcoin prices fell below $16,000 in the fourth quarter of last year, we were one of very few miners with a positive, Adjusted EBITDA, and that goes to show what happens. I think if you really want to test what miners were, go back to the fourth quarter of last year and see their results.
We are well-positioned, and I think, sort of as we go into the next summer when the halving is going to take place without debt, we are going to even be better positioned. With the, the Paraguay expansion, those are going to be low cost. We are going to have more cash flow. The other thing you have to remember, when things get adverse like they do, miners with inefficient operations go offline. That is when the network hash rate goes down, our market share goes up, our block rewards go up, and there is a compensating factor there. We think we are well-positioned. That is the first question. Okay, firmware. Yes, because we are so operationally focused, we have people within our operations that look at these type of things and test them all the time.
If, getting better control of your miners and squeezing more output from them, of course, we all, all wanna do that. Sometimes it's firmware, and now there's some hardware fixes with cards as well. We test a number of them, because there's, there's advantages to that. Sometimes the OEM firmware is fine, and the other thing that we need to keep in track, which is a little bit different from some of the others, about 90% of our fleet is MicroBT versus Bitmain. Some of these firmwares are, are firmware changes are, are more tailored for Bitmain. Some work with MicroBT. But yes, we're always looking at these things, trying to get an advantage. And, and it's, it's not necessarily uniformly applied across the fleet.
We do not want to fall into a bug or something like that, so we, we test them on a very limited basis and, and roll them out a little more when appropriate. Hopefully that addresses those two questions. Operator, let's go to the analyst, please.
We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touch tone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Josh Siegler from Cantor Fitzgerald. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question today. I guess to start-
Hi, Josh.
It would be helpful to get an understanding of how you're thinking about future growth, specifically, which geography is really going to drive that growth. You know, with the new Paraguay contracts in place, there's still opportunity in Argentina. How are you going to balance between the two geographies when thinking about scaling in the future? Thanks.
Josh, we've got management and personnel in every single geography. It makes sense to have critical mass in every geography that we operate in so that we can do that. We, over the last 2, 2.5 years, have done an active technology and knowledge transfer amongst employees so that we have Argentine employees and Washington employees coming up to Quebec. Quebec employees going to the other geographies and teaching. Those best practices that we developed in Quebec years ago, they're now embedded in our other geographies, and we now feel we've got critical mass in Argentina. We've got a good team, solid team in Washington and of course, in Quebec. Now the opportunity came about to really take our 10 MW operation in Paraguay and build it up. Frankly, we're excited about Paraguay.
It was, it was a site where it was a bit of a test bed back in late 2021 when we built it. It became active in January 2022. 10 MW, we shipped down used miners from Quebec. The experiment was a very good success. We put that facility together, it's a warehouse-style building, in about three and a half months. It was our lowest cost infrastructure to build, and we subsequently put brand-new miners in there and brought the production up. Our plan is to hire more personnel in Paraguay for this build and build... Establish critical mass. The Paso Pe facility is one kilometer from our Villa Rica site, so we can already take advantage of some of the talent there. This is a much bigger build-out.
It, it, it's 50 MW, involves the build of a substation, so we're going to high voltage and knocking it down. 50 MW is what's been announced. We've announced 20 MW using the MicroBT Hydro Containers, and those orders have been placed. As I said in my script, we're feeling very confident about the 6.3 growth for September, because that's gonna be from the miners coming into Argentina right now, and from taking Baie-Comeau from 4.85 MW right now up to 11, which is the maximum capacity of the electrical current available. It'll be upgraded next year. With the 20 MW of contracts that we've done, that'll take us up to 7. Civil work is gonna start probably in early September there.
Miners are gonna start arriving later in the year and into January. The longest contract there is the transformer, the big main transformer there. We're actually overbuilding it with hope that we can get more expansion in the area. Instead of 50, we're building, we're buying an 80 MW transformer there. It's got the longest lead time, about 6.5, 7 months. We plan to put that order in, in the next number of days, get that started. It's actually gonna be the last thing to arrive, so we expect to go from basically zero, zero megawatts to 50 MW, literally with the flip of a switch. Hopefully, that's in the latter part of February, maybe it's early March, but certainly before the halving, and that's for 20 MW.
Then there's 30 MW that we have not talked about yet, and that 30 MW, we hope to provide more news in the coming days and weeks. This isn't guidance, but, you know, that could very, very much take us up to 7.8 exahash if things come together as we expect. Our guidance is right now for 7 exahash in the first quarter of next year. I added a little bit extra there, but, feel free to have a follow-up.
No, that's, that's all really helpful color. Thank you. Appreciate that. Then I also wanted to touch on, you know, as we're heading into the halving and mining rigs and secondary markets at least still remain at fairly depressed price levels, are you thinking about, potentially replacing some older machines and improving the efficiency across the fleet?
Josh, all the time. All the time. That's, that's the nature of the business we're in. If you do not upgrade your fleet, frankly, you're gonna die, and the halving is gonna expedite that process. I think we have some M31S right now. Some of them we're redeploying, but other ones we're selling. Most of those are, are coming out. They're the least efficient of our miners, and we continue to upgrade. Case in point, these, these hydro miners are amongst the most efficient in the world with the highest output. They are going to very much enhance our efficiency across the fleet. Just like what I mentioned about Washington State in terms of, the, the changes to the intake and exhaust systems there and bringing the temperature down and getting more out of our existing miners.
Our fleet, if you were to look, look from top to bottom, is already modern, and we are continuing to modernize it and go with the latest models. We are not going for immersion cooling, but we're going to air-cooled, which we do very, very well, particularly with our geographies and the hydro miners. We're very excited about that.
Got it. Thank you very much for answering my questions today.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Kevin Dede of HCW. Please go ahead.
Mr. Morphy, Mr. Lucas, thanks for taking my question.
Good morning.
I, I guess the 1st thing is, maybe you peel the onion back a little bit on the PPA, eh, the PPAs, plural, I guess, in Paraguay. Are they both with ANDE? Are there? Can you talk at all to, I guess, the costs associated with them and, you know, whether or not there are, you know, curtailment opportunities for you there?
Okay. The first answer to the question is, yes, there's- we bought companies that owned 2 separate companies that owned power purchase agreements. They are both with ANDE. The, the Villa Rica site is with CLYFSA. We moved from the regional distributor to the national distributor. The cost of the power for that is $0.039. As I've talked about before, there's some optimism and hope that with the, the new party in the election and the promises that were given, that that power might actually be reduced, like the cost of it. You know, fingers crossed there, and, and it could be a tangible reduction. That we haven't, we haven't banked on that, but that's what we're hoping for.
In terms of the, the deployment, like, we haven't put out any big, any of the numbers on, on that yet, except for the fact that the 20 MW of MicroBT hydro containers, we used our credits. From a cash, there's still a cost there, but from a cash perspective, we're not out of pocket. Really, it's the substation that, that has a cost to it. The air-cooled warehouses have a cost to them, but we do that very efficiently. In Paraguay, it's frankly the lowest cost in our, in our whole fleet. Jeff Lucas, do you wanna come in with a sort of a little more sort of finality with, with some of the costs there?
With the 30 MW not announced yet, we're kinda stuck on being able to sort of give total project costs at this point. I, I, I give that as a caveat.
Yeah, sure. I'm more than glad to speak to that here. So for, for Paso Pe, what we're looking at here, we're contemplating roughly $24 million, and that encompasses not only the infrastructure build-out here, including the substation and 80 MW substation, versus the initial opportunity to 50 MW here. Secondly, a certain guarantee, another payment that we made, about $4 million to the power provider here. Overall, we're looking roughly again, around $20 million of what's happening in Paso Pe, of which we're contemplating $14 million being paid remainder of this calendar year, and the other $6 million or so will be done in early 2024.
I know, Mr. Morphy, you mentioned that importing things into Paraguay was a little bit easier than Argentina. I'm wondering if the hydro machines already manufactured, or would you expect any delay getting those on the site, or is it really exclusively just a matter of getting that... I mean, from what I understand, you're starting with a greenfield, open plot of land, and that needs to be treated, and the substation and the grid connection and all of that has to come in. I'm just wondering if you would expect or would it be prudent on from our perspective, to assume that MicroBT might hit hurdles in getting their new, their new machines to your site?
We really don't anticipate any problems bringing, bringing the equipment into Paraguay. It's always been pretty straightforward. Compared to Argentina, it's always been quicker and easier to get equipment, in fact, even used equipment into Paraguay, and, and the ability to source other equipment that goes into the infrastructure. It's always been really easier in Paraguay, as long as you have the right documents. You can bring it in, you pay the VAT, and you get it on site. Argentina, as we've learned over the last two and a half years, has been more difficult. First, we didn't have the self-importation rights because we hadn't done business there for 2 years and didn't have the track record to apply for that self-importation. We had to rely on brokers that were expensive. They only had small allocations.
Then, last summer, when the government was really under strain for its U.S. dollar reserves, they stopped direct importation for people like us and in many other industries, dead in its tracks. We were stymied for a lot of months, and our 50 MW warehouse there was fully constructed in October, but we weren't in it, able to put it into, sort of bring it up to full operation until earlier this year, and that was a real setback. The government didn't provide any alternative mechanisms until we could qualify for, to be a self-importer, which fortunately we are, and things are a lot better now. They also have a government change coming in November.
There is uncertainty there, and it's one of the reasons why we decided to take advantage of these opportunities in Paraguay and really make that one of our, our geographic hubs. Like, the whole LATAM area is a, is a geographic hub, but putting more emphasis and more growth into, to Paraguay at this time. It's also all hydro, too, which we think long run is going to be a win for the industry and our company.
Just switching gears to Quebec for the moment. You spoke to a rate increase. I'm wondering if that was like universally, and I apologize in not having researched this. I was wondering if that was universally applied by Hydro-Quebec or if it was more sort of township regulated, and w- whether or not you would expect that to be rolled back or something that continues forever going forward?
Well, fortunately, rate increases in Quebec don't happen very often. This, this was applied right across the board. It applied to our tariff with a few nuances. It happens to other industrial tariffs. This was pretty much right across the board. This is Hydro-Quebec, reassessing where they are, realizing their electricity grid, will become more strained as electric vehicles and greenhouses and other industries using electricity in the future surge, and they contemplate building new hydro, hydro projects down the road. There's a lot of discussion with the new provincial government and Hydro-Quebec about that. We've been intervening in some of the hearings and some of the things happening.
It was actually a great opportunity for us to once again, talk about some of the benefits that we can bring to Hydro-Quebec of Bitcoin mining, taking our miners and putting them in areas where the hydro is, rather than wheeling power long distances, using some of the thermal benefits that are available. I, I think they're finally seeing that, like, our ability to curtail on a moment's notice can actually be a huge benefit to them, and we're unique in that feature. There's more developments gonna happen in Quebec, but I do not contemplate another increase, at least for the foreseeable future in Quebec. Yeah, this was a universal one, and it was too bad. It, it impacted our results, and will continue to impact our results.
Compared to the level of inflation, I think we've had 1 increase, 6%. That was basically less than the rate of inflation last year, and this has been several years since our last rate increase. Really, we're still below the increase in inflation, which by and large is good.
Last question for me, gentlemen. In the past, there was some discussion of future opportunity in Washington. Congrats on improving your efficiency there. I'm curious to how you might see potential expansion in Washington State.
Washington still is a very attractive place, and it's nice that we have talent there. It's one of the hotbeds of crypto mining. There's opportunities to expand both greenfield and through acquisitions. The one thing that happened, at least in the county we're in and, and with the utility we're dealing with, is they put up the price of power earlier this year as well. We've gone from being one of the low-cost power facilities that we have to, once again, sort of being in sort of more in the upper quartile or so. That's taken some of the attractiveness out of Washington for the time being.
Similarly, we're having discussions with that utility, talking about the benefits and looking around that whole area, that Columbia River and what was built for effectively the, the smelters from days gone by, makes it, makes it a very interesting area. No, we're not giving up on that area.
Thanks. Thanks very much, Geoff. Appreciate the color.
Good. Thanks, Kevin.
Our next question comes from Bill Papanastasiou of Stifel. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Geoff Morphy and Jeff Lucas. Thanks for taking my questions.
Hello, Bill.
Hi, Bill.
Yeah, so for my first question, just hoping to gain some insight on the average cost of power that was realized in Argentina in the quarter, just for the purposes of measuring the impact to margins, and the road ahead. You know, obviously, the company shifted from drawing on power from the grid in Rio Cuarto to the very attractive $0.03 power contract. How should we look at that?
Sure. Let me, let me speak to that, and then Geoff can add a little further color to that. We are starting to get the benefits, and we did see the benefits beginning to accrue in the second quarter from that shift that you spoke to. But we didn't get all the benefit here. We've talked about Argentina, you know, cost being in the $0.03 range here, and we didn't experience that in the quarter again, because part of that quarter was actually from the grid itself. While we didn't get that much of a savings, to give you some concrete numbers here, in the first quarter, the cost of power in Argentina for us was about $0.046. In the second quarter, the average amount in Argentina, again, was about $0.044.
That includes a period of time where we had in the $0.03 range, getting it right from the power provider, and then also a period of time where we were getting it from the grid as well. That kind of gives you a bit of a context. The expectation here is that we're actually gonna continue to achieve, you know, great improvements in Argentina. That's actually gonna lower our rates overall. Now, bear in mind, another comment to keep in mind here, that Argentina wasn't that large a contributor in the second quarter. As we're ramping up, you know, to 29 MW and then going to 50 MW, perhaps even beyond here, you know, we're gonna have a much larger portion of the total Bitcoin that actually will be mined in Argentina. That's also going to accrue to our benefit.
Thanks-
Let me add to that. Let me add to that, too. Like, as Jeff mentioned, we're, we're moving from the 29 MW up to the 50 MW very soon. That will optimize our facility there. We're still ramping up, so there's costs to do that in terms of the natural gas and the power costs. Once we're at 50 MW, we can optimize better. Almost more importantly, is start to get a little cooler in this part of the world, in the Northern Hemisphere.
In the southern time part of the atmosphere, they're warning into the summer season, starting in October, which is where their summer starts, warmer temperatures, they consume less natural gas, the price of natural gas goes down, that's where, for the 6, 7, 8 months, we are-- we should see much lower natural gas prices, which will lead to lower electricity prices. That's where I think when you-- when we do our next quarter results, or certainly in, in March, when we do our full year results, you'll be able to ask the same question, hopefully, we are talking more of the, we've had less than 3 cents. We really are averaging the 3 cents type of area, we start seeing the real margins come out of that facility. There's one other thing.
They are putting an extra pipeline up, providing more natural gas to the area in which our power, the power plant next door to us is, which is, which was a supply constraint in the past. That was being activated in July, so it should be in pretty good state right now. With more natural gas coming up and not being constrained, that should help the price, too.
Our next question comes from Chase White of Compass Point Research and Trading. Please go ahead.
Thanks, guys. Just, just so I'm clear that, excuse me, the second 7 exahash target includes only the, the 20 MW of the 150 you just acquired in PPAs in Paraguay, right? It's... there's nothing-
Correct.
... incremental from Argentina past 50 MW.
Correct.
Additional 20 MW Paraguay. Okay, just making sure.
Correct.
Um-
Yes, if we infill the 30 MW on that 50 MW as we expect, I think you'll see us, bump our guidance up to sort of that 7.8-ish area. We're not ready to do that yet. We won't. We generally only do guidance when we have clear and firmer, sight lines to how to get there.
Gotcha. then, you know, in, in terms of obviously, that would still just be 50 of 150+
Mm-hmm.
Everything else in, in Argentina. I mean, what would you need to see in the market for to want to green light all of your potential expansion projects? And would you generally finance it with, you know, is the, the Bitcoin sales and, and selling ATM shares, and, and how do you think about that?
Let me start, and I can't...
Okay.
Go ahead, Geoff.
Please, Jeff Lucas, go ahead.
Okay, sure. you know, the one thing we need to see, Chase, more than anything else, a little more stability and certainty in terms of what the Argentine outlook is. I say that because bear in mind right now, they're in the process of going through an election. They actually have their presidential primaries this Sunday, and they have the presidential election itself on October 22nd. There are four different candidates, not to develop too much in the politics here, there are four different candidates who are remarkably close in the polls. Some are advocating financial policies that seem to be very constructive for us. Others require a little more thinking involved here. In part, by the way, what's driving the fact that their U.S. dollar reserves are actually negative to the tune of about $8 billion.
They know they have the country has to address this. That can introduce uncertainties, similar to what we saw and the pain that we experienced, obviously, last year. We want to make sure that as we're looking at great opportunities here, we're also very cognizant of the potential impact and the benefits that the halving is going to bring, to make sure that we're moving very carefully and very thoughtfully from that angle. In terms of how we're going to finance it, first of all, this is Argentina. You don't finance through debt, clearly. Those opportunities just really aren't available at anything worthy of a reasonable rate or price. The goal here, primarily, as overall strategy speaks to, is to use our excess cash flow from operations to fund the capital expenditures down there, and then secondly, of course, to use the ATM.
We're always, always tapping the ATM with a very careful eye to how we apply those funds to make sure that they're accretive, and that we get an attractive ROI and a short payback on them. Go ahead, Geoff.
That's right. Paraguay, as I mentioned, the longest lead time is the primary transformer. It's seven months. That gets us really close to the halving, and with our own internal guidelines, is that we do not want to be in construction, we do not want to have debt. All of this during, during those first few months of the halving, we want to be lean. We want to survive. We got long-term goals. When we saw this opportunity to buy these two contracts, we didn't see it for necessarily immediate build-out, although we were hoping it, we might be able to. We saw it as long-term. That 100 MW is, is an opportunity to expand. We are looking at developing it right now. Maybe we'll do the substation sort of over the next seven months.
We can add some production, or maybe we just do the substation, and maybe we get ready so that we have warehouses and a site ready to go sort of about four, five, six months after the halving, when Bitcoin prices start to rip again, when the network hash rate is lower and we have more market share, and it makes pure sense because of our capital structure and what we've built over the last number of years, to then just jump right in with both feet and fully build it out. We practice a very disciplined decision process here, and so far, the pieces are not coming together to build it out over the next seven, eight months, but we are examining that very closely, and we're looking at a number of other things, too.
Capital allocation is important, and we continue to want to be a diversified company and make sure that we put our precious capital where it'll do the most good.
Got it. Helpful. Thank you.
I think Bill, got disconnected there from the note that I got, so maybe he's back, and maybe operator, you can put him back in. I think he has another question.
We will take another question from Bill Papanastasiou. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thanks, guys. Sorry about that. I'm not sure why I disconnected, but I just wanted to talk about the recent purchase of the M53S+ machine. I know these are the first hydro-cooled mining units in the fleet. I believe you, you alluded to the fact that, you know, we could see a higher proportion of hydro-cooled miners in the overall fleet in the long run, as, you know, you continue to improve fleet efficiencies. I just wanted to gain kind of a high-level understanding of how the company is looking at hydro-cooled mining units compared to other types of ASIC uses, such as, you know, air, air cooling or immersion cooling. You know, could we see more peers also move towards hydro-cooled mining in the future?
Well, I can't really speak for our peers, but I can speak for us. Hydro, hydro cooled is a new technology. It's not that we are on the bleeding edge here. There are, there are deployments, and it's, it's can be more efficient in that you do not have to plunge your miners into a bath of dielectric fluid, sticky, oily, dielectric fluid. It's more efficient. Then we're going into more plumbing-related type of things where you have cool water that's going through, you're cooling the circuits, and, and we think it's more efficient. We think it supersedes immersion. I guess time will tell, but that's our position on it.
Immersion has turned out to be expensive, I think this offers more opportunities for expansion, like these things push out production at two and a half, 2, 2.5x more than sort of pretty much the S19s and M30S in our fleet. The efficiencies are tremendous. We know enough, and we think this is exciting enough that this is where we're gonna go next. It will not replace air-cooled. Air-cooled is still something we do very, very well. As you look at supercomputers and other things, you know, they use these type of technologies, and as we continue to push for higher levels of efficiency, you have to look at what some of the other industries have done. We're doing that.
By the way-
I can tell you as well, Bill. Oh, go ahead.
Yeah. I was gonna say, and by the way, I don't want to interrupt Geoff here, but what gets us excited, not only in the performance business scenes, but the economics behind it for our benefit as well. For those of you who just aren't familiar, particularly with the, you know, the M53S+ and Plus Plus, these things have 24 watts per terahash. They're about 280 terahash per unit, and the economics of these things is well below a third less than, for example, an XP Hydro, which may be a little better performance here, but are dramatically more expensive.
Right.
I'm sorry, go ahead, Geoff.
Where I was gonna go next is because you have this hot fluid, you can also take this industry to what we think is also sort of the next frontier, and that's getting capturing the residual heat and putting it to good use. When you have air-cooled, it's very tough to transport hot air at any distance at all. We do it now in Quebec by heating some of the warehouse spaces in adjacent industries. We look for aqua farming and various other things, but in fluid form, and not dielectric fluid, you can push this into other things. I know MicroBT is looking at future generations where they can put concentrate more heat into the, that's going. I think the ability to provide heat to buildings and other things much more effectively and efficiently is there.
While we don't know that for sure, by, by buying these machines and getting more familiar with them now, we are very hopeful that we can squeeze more efficiency out by possibly selling some of the heat in fluid form, down the road, and, and that would be particularly attractive in possibly Washington, but more so in Quebec, as we get more adjacent to industries and things like that.
Great, thank you for that color. Geoff, you know, you were talking about the halving that's coming up, and I was just hoping to get your expert knowledge and your team's expert knowledge on kind of the evolution of mining, you know, as we proceed to another event of Bitcoin rewards getting halved. We've seen a lot of Bitcoin mining operators, you know, transition their business from being completely self-mining to diversifying into high performance and cloud computing. Many of these players cite that, you know, they've gained a significant amount of experience at operating data centers. Bitfarms is arguably has the most long-standing experience. You know, you guys, you guys are scaling to 12 farms by early next year.
How do you see kind of the industry evolving from, you know, from, from where it is today, given, you know, a potential trend of margins deterioration?
Bitcoin is an amazing thing. That protocol, with its self-adjustment mechanisms and with adoption and everything else, we, we absolutely feel confident that over time, the adoption of Bitcoin with the inflation in the world, with governments printing money, that, that Bitcoin has a real place, over the next few years, five, 10, the adoption is gonna be tremendous. That will take care of a lot of things because the price is gonna go up, and that will allow the industry, through the halving, to sort of reinvent itself. The weakest players will go bankrupt. There'll be some upstarts, then there's gonna be a handful of us that are public and others. There's a lot of private companies in the world that will do very well, and they will expand.
They will continue to push the barriers in terms of efficiency, as I said, using their thermal properties, the residual heat in other applications, being closer to the sources, to, to the electricity sources, to be able to work on solar and wind and these type of things, and energy management. All that's going to continue to evolve. In terms of other opportunities in data center management, like we, we operate data centers basically on steroids. high performance, but not like Tier 3 data centers where there's redundancy and everything else. They use a lot of less electricity. They need to have 99.9% uptime, and then we see AI and high power computing that sort of comes somewhere in between. There's gonna be a huge demand for that.
High power computing, we can sort of do, but it has-- but we're not set up to have redundancy in terms of diesel generators to come on when, we have to curtail. There has to be a, a fine place for us to play. AI is exciting. Some of the high power computing is exciting. They talk about phenomenal growth over the next six years. We do have experience, but I'm not sure if it's the right experience, and frankly, we're, we're doing that research to understand whether there might be a role for us there. We're not gonna jump willy-nilly into, to something where we don't know much about. It changes the fundamental aspect to your commercial operations, too. Right now, effectively, we, we have no clients.
We mine Bitcoin, and we sell Bitcoin to the pool, and then we get them, and we sell them to make the business work. If you start getting into commercial contracts, sometimes you're hosting, sometimes you're not. These contracts tend to have two or three years. You have to be much more customer-focused. None of us really have those customer-facing people right now, so we'd have to build that part of the business and get ready for churn. It's not a simple overnight decision just to jump into that type of business, and if we're gonna do it, it needs to have the margins and longevity to make sense, and we're evaluating that very closely.
Bill, one other comment to make here, you know, actually, a shout-out goes to our I.T. team because the economics naturally tighten with the halving coming up here. Managing and getting information from your miners to run them more, you know, precisely and more efficiently is gonna be key, and I think our MGMT 2 programming and the developments we're making to that right now really give us an edge in that area, and we think that's gonna work to our advantage, certainly when the halving comes.
Great, I really appreciate that color, color, amazing response.
That concludes our question-and-answer session. I'll now turn the call back over to Geoff Morphy, CEO of Bitfarms. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, Alan. I would like to reiterate three points about Bitfarms. One, we've maintained profitable mining operations each quarter as a result of our determination to maintain stable, low energy and operating costs. Two, with little capital outlay, we expect to reach 6.3 exahash per second by the end of Q3 from our existing portfolio and reach 7 exahash per second in Q1 2024. Three, a major expansion is underway in Paraguay, and we are well positioned to move quickly on other major, as well as minor expansion opportunities that meet our investment criteria. Thank you all for attending today's conference call. We look forward to updating you with our monthly production reports, as well as our other developments at our upcoming Analyst Day in September 14th and when we announce our Q3 results in the fall. Thank you very much.
The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.