Cryptocurrency mining company Marathon Digital has announced a partnership with Zero Two to create a large-scale mining facility in Abu Dhabi.
According to a statement from the newly formed Abu Dhabi Global Markets (ADGM), it will begin construction of two facilities to install equipment with a total capacity of 250MW. The larger 200 MW area will be located in the Masdar City ecological zone and the remaining 50 MW facilities will be located in the Mina Zayed port area. The shareholding in ADGM is split 80% for Zero Two and 20% for Marathon.
Total investment in the project is expected to reach $406 million in 2023. The mined digital assets will be distributed twice a month according to the shares of each company. Earlier, Marathon and Zero Two ran a pilot program to test the effectiveness of mining in Abu Dhabi, where "the desert climate made air-cooled cryptocurrency mining impossible."
"To overcome these environmental challenges, we developed a special immersion solution for cooling the ASIC miners and implemented custom software to optimize their performance," said Marathon representatives. According to the companies' calculations, the new mining areas will be completed by the end of 2023 and their total hashing power will reach 7 EH/s. Recall that Marathon reported a net loss of $686.7 million for 2022 and mined a total of 4144 BTC. In the first quarter of 2023, the company mined 2,195 BTC – 41% more than in the previous period.
