The miner agreed to buy an 80-megawatt Ethiopian site almost two years ago, and on September 28 the facility's power supplier gave its operator ten days to pay a disputed bill or lose collateralized equipment. BitFuFu says it is weighing termination and arbitration against the sellers.
BitFuFu said on October 13 that its agreement to acquire a majority stake in an Ethiopian company operating an 80-megawatt bitcoin mining facility has still not closed, and that it now sees a material risk the target will be unable to satisfy the conditions attached to the deal. The Nasdaq-listed miner has paid the sellers $4,100,000 and has about 13,700 Bitmain Antminer S19 series machines deployed at the site, according to the September production and operational update it published after the US close.
The target company is in a contractual dispute with its electric power supplier in Ethiopia and has not paid the disputed amounts. On September 28 the supplier told the target it would take possession of the target's collateralized equipment if payment was not made within a ten-day notice period. That period expired on or about October 8, five days before the release, which says the money is still unpaid. BitFuFu did not say whether the supplier has acted, and it did not name the supplier, the target, the sellers or the sum in dispute.
The agreement dates to October 22, 2024, when BitFuFu's wholly owned subsidiary Finfront Holding Company agreed to buy the stake. The company said it is evaluating potential termination of the agreement, arbitration against the sellers, and recovery of the amounts it has paid along with the return of the deployed machines.
What is left to recover is mostly cash. The machines carried a total net book value of $1.74 million as of September 30, which works out to about $127 a unit across roughly 13,700 of them. At that book value the hardware is depreciated close to nothing, which leaves the $4.1 million already handed to the sellers as the larger exposure, alongside equipment sitting on a site whose power supply is in dispute. The machines are rated at about 1.57 EH/s, equivalent to 41 percent of the 3.8 EH/s BitFuFu reports as self-owned hashrate, though the release does not say whether they sit inside that figure.
The monthly numbers underneath the disclosure barely moved. BitFuFu mined 167 bitcoin in September against 174 in August, which the company reported as a 4.0 percent decline. September had one fewer day: on a daily basis, assuming 31 days in August and 30 in September, the rate went from 5.613 to 5.567 bitcoin, a fall of 0.8 percent. The company's own average daily production figure was unchanged at 5.6 bitcoin.
The mix shifted more than the total. Self-mining produced 98 bitcoin, up from 88, which is 3.267 a day against 2.839, a 15 percent increase on a self-owned hashrate the company reports as unchanged at 3.8 EH/s. The release gives no difficulty, uptime or luck figures, so what lifted that output is not established. Cloud mining went the other way, down to 69 bitcoin from 86, a decline of 19.8 percent. That is the segment whose revenue fell 73.6 percent year on year in the second quarter, and the one the company built its name on. Binance is closing its own mining pool and cloud mining service on November 10, having given no reason beyond a review of its products.
Hashrate under management fell to 19.4 EH/s from 20.6 EH/s, and the whole decline came from third-party suppliers and hosting customers, which dropped to 15.6 EH/s from 16.8 EH/s. Self-owned capacity did not move. Power capacity under management fell to 324 MW from 344 MW. In August the managed total had reached the roughly 20 EH/s BitFuFu said it was targeting after the second quarter closed at 15.3 EH/s. One month later it is back below that mark.
The company ended September holding 1,388 bitcoin, 15 more than at the end of August. Leo Lu, the chairman and chief executive, said in the release that "September reflected the stability of our operating platform and our continued focus on operational efficiency." The operating metrics are unaudited and the release carries the standard safe-harbor language.
Monthly updates like this one are self-reported and unaudited. Bitdeer's August disclosure showed how much can sit behind one line of a production table, pairing a self-mining hashrate near 80 EH/s with a month-end balance of 61 bitcoin. BitFuFu's figures this month sit above a disclosure that the company may end up in arbitration to recover what it has already spent.
