Frank Holmes has had a long career as a money administrator: finance gold mining companies; get involved in the creation of gold royalty companies; Development of financial products for the airline industry: all this with the global investors of the USA (Grow), the asset management firm that it lies in the stock market that has led since 1989.
He is also the president of Hive Blockchain Technologies (HIVE), a Bitcoin mining company with a market capitalization of $ 345 million and a fingerprint in rapid expansion in Paraguay, thanks to a recent agreement in which the company acquired the facilities previously owned by another mining, bitfars. The firm was born, he said, after trying to launch a Spot Bitcoin Traded background (ETF) in 2017.
Hive has been green from the beginning. His first installation used geothermal energy in Iceland; Another used hydroelectric energy in Sweden, just 100 kilometers south of the Arctic circle. Now, the company expects to have approximately 430 megawatts (MW) of infrastructure in operation in the third quarter of 2025, which means sufficient energy to feed a city of 86,000 homes.
Holmes will speak at the BTC and Mining Summit in consensus 2025, in Toronto from May 14 to 15.
In the period prior to the event, Holmes shared his thoughts on the situation of Hive within the broader mining industry, the company’s decision to recycle its GPU for the purposes of AI and what the future holds.
This interview has been condensed and edited by clarity.
COINDESK: Hive has been reusing some of his GPU for AI. Can you tell me about that?
Frank Holmes: There was a moment we had 130,000 AMD chips and we were undermining Ether (ETH). We were about 6% of the world’s ether mining and was very profitable. When that left [with Ethereum’s transition to Proof-of-Stake in 2022]We had this experience in GPU chips and replaced many of our AMD chips with Nvidia chips. That allowed us to start following the path of AI.
The difference between a basic Asic miner and Nvidia chips is like driving a bronco and a ferrari. The delicacy of the engine, the engines, all the gears that enter a high -performance car, all that is much more related to a GPU. When the professionals of the S21 antminators appear, it takes us six hours to develop them and plug them. When the Nvidia chips appear, like an H100, six weeks passed before you built the brain and work. So it is a completely different set of skills.
When you are building infrastructure for Bitcoin mining, you are spending a million dollars per electricity megavatio. When high performance computing (HPC) enters, the facilities need so much redundancy that you spend $ 10 million for Megavatio. That is to exclude the team. It has much higher logistics engineering requirements and has much higher capital expenses.
When you want to obtain energy for Bitcoin mining, you can take variable energy, and the real key part is the cost of energy. In Sweden, we can go from 30 megawatts to three megawatts in 15 seconds. So we can return energy or assume it.
When you are HPC, you must be awake all the time, so you must have this backup copy of generators, batteries. The stability of energy is much more critical for HPC than for Bitcoin mining. Then you have a matrix with which you are trying to play.
Does the Trump administration tariff strategy impact its operations?
We listen to the United States because it is very important for brand and liquidity. But we never did anything in the United States because we are always worried about the overreach of regulatory agencies in Washington. They basically put together the auditors to chase anyone in cryptography. Then we said: “Let’s keep neutral in this jurisdiction.” Then Trump won, so we decided to move our central office. That is strategic, because if your central office is in the United States, it qualifies for many of the various indices. We still have no mining operations in the United States.
But you have expanded significantly in Paraguay.
I think what happened in Paraguay to Bit Farms is that they went through a distraction with their CEO. [left]. There was a vacuum. Then Riot (Riot) tried to enter to buy and control them. During that agitation period, the Paraguayan government put a tariff on Bitcoin miners, which was really very strange, but happened, and I think, I think next year. Everything was disturbing for the new CEO, and wanted to pivot the United States, so they merged with Stonghold (SDIG) to basically become an American company, as a reverse acquisition.
They still have 80 megawatts of electricity in Paraguay, but most of the operations we are now assuming. We are finishing construction, and we are very excited about that. We already have some machines working. We have the greatest growth profile in 2025 of all Bitcoin miners. We have not done any of these convertible Funky obligations to buy Bitcoin. Most of them paid much higher prices. No, we have not done it because we know how volatile it can be. Every time everyone starts doing this compulsive debt, well, before, in 2021 everything was to buy mining equipment. This time, everything is to buy Bitcoin. Bitcoin then goes to a correction, and everyone strangles. We just don’t want to be in that position.
We really see the opportunity in Paraguay. It has the largest dam of the western hemisphere, shared 50/50 with Brazil. There are 14 gigawatts and about eight kilometers long. It is so immense. If Paraguay does not use electricity, then Brazil can keep it. Well, Bitcoin miners don’t do that. We help develop their infrastructure, and they are paid US dollars every month. Therefore, it is a mutual benefit for the Paraguayan government and is a mutual benefit for Hive shareholders, because we want to stay focused on green energy.
Are there other jurisdictions you are looking for expanding?
We are looking for proposals from East Africa. Ethiopia in particular has a lot of stranded electricity. Some of the other miners have already gone to that area. They obtained all this cheap money from the World Bank and other institutions, and built the dams, but then did not build the electricity lines throughout the economy. It is a great expense. We have a very clear vision of going from 6 EH/SA approximately 25 eh/s in the next nine months.
How do you see the situation of the mining industry at this time?
I don’t think it’s healthy. You have to be aware that there is a change for many of the great miners. The main US corporations are not really in mining expansion. They are predominantly focused on adding Bitcoin to their balance. Everyone is emulating Michael Saylor’s business model. But for the Bitcoin ecosystem to work, it must have growth in the nodes. It must have a growth in mining operations so that we become even more decentralized. Some of the companies should probably be investing more in the Lightning Network or in the infrastructure of the orderly to differentiate themselves.
What Bitdeer is doing (BTDR) [with ASIC manufacturing] It is really intelligent. The founder was also co -founder of Bitmain. So, when entering with a new piece of technology that is very energetically efficient in terms of joules consumed, I think it is very good and competitive for capital markets.
The Bitcoin miners will go through a process that happened to the gold miners. When the GLD went out for bullion, there was suddenly a separation: gold stocks against the GLD. This century, Gold Bullion has surpassed S&P 500 by a wide margin. But only quality gold actions, royalty gold stocks, have actually overcome. One of the things that Hive has always had is the old model of high -income by employee royalties, so that we can deal with these drafts and not have to go through this panic of great dismissals.
