Northern Data, a European cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and bitcoin mining company, is reportedly mulling going public in U.S. markets. The company would be in talks to complete its initial public offering (IPO) in 2025, creating an entity combining its AI cloud computing and data center divisions. This new entity would have a valuation […]
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Northern Data’s Peak Mining Acquires Second 300-Megawatt Site in Texas
According to Peak Mining, a subsidiary of the German bitcoin mining and infrastructure firm Northern Data, the company has announced the purchase of a 300-megawatt ERCOT-approved site in Corpus Christi, Texas. The site is adjacent to another location acquired by the firm in December 2023. Peak Mining Purchases ERCOT-Approved Texas Site Northern Data’s Peak Mining […]
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Northern Data Subsidiary Bolsters AI Capabilities With $362 Million Nvidia GPU Investment
On Wednesday, Northern Data Group, headquartered in Frankfurt and specializing in bitcoin mining, disclosed that its subsidiary, Taiga Cloud, has secured a significant acquisition of about 8,200 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). These newly acquired units will complement Northern Data’s current collection of artificial intelligence (AI)-oriented hardware, following their previous acquisition of 10,000 Nvidia GPUs in September.
Taiga’s 2M Nvidia AI Boost; Northern Data Launches Liquid-Cooled Bitcoin Mining Site
In a continuous stride towards growth in the generative AI sector, Northern Data Group and its subsidiary, Taiga Cloud, announced on November 29 another noteworthy expansion. Taiga Cloud has enhanced its AI infrastructure through the procurement of additional Nvidia-based GPUs.
The expansion includes equipping Taiga Cloud with HPE Cray XD supercomputers, furnished with Nvidia H100 GPU Tensor Core GPUs. This latest acquisition, valued at 330 million euros or equivalently 2 million, was facilitated by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). The company had previously acquired 10,000 Nvidia units in September.
“Taiga and HPE share similar beliefs and values, which are aligned to democratizing access to cutting-edge sustainable generative AI technology,” Karl Havard the managing director of Taiga Cloud said in a statement. “We understand that AI workloads require purpose-built AI-native architecture where hundreds and even thousands of nodes work together in concert to support a single workload.”
The recent announcement highlights Taiga’s ascendancy as a frontrunner among Europe’s generative AI Cloud Service Providers. Taiga’s investment in AI hardware exceeds 0 million, granting them “access to over 18,000 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs.” Additionally, Taiga revealed its generative AI Cloud’s achievement of 100% carbon neutrality, maintained through energy-efficient Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratios below 1.2.
In a parallel development, Northern Data is advancing its bitcoin mining endeavors. Its subsidiary, Peak Mining, has commenced the construction of a 30-megawatt (MW) mining facility in Grand Forks, North Dakota. The project, which began this month, is on track to be operational in the first quarter of 2024. The facility, boasting state-of-the-art direct-to-chip liquid-cooling technology, will utilize Microbt‘s advanced liquid-cooled M53S++ miners.
What do you think about bitcoin mining firms expanding into the AI sector? Share your thoughts and opinions about this subject in the comments section below.
Northern Data Secures $600 Million Loan From Tether Amidst AI Hardware Investment Spree
Northern Data Group has confirmed a €575 million (0M) debt financing from Tether Group, a signal of heightened activity in the high-performance computing sector responding to the artificial intelligence (AI) demand surge. The firm detailed that the funding is poised to advance Northern Data’s cloud services and hardware capabilities, focusing on generative AI technologies.
Northern Data Group Nets €575M From Tether to Supercharge AI and HPC Expansion
The Frankfurt-based Northern Data Group, a bitcoin (BTC) mining company expanding into specialized high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, has secured a financing deal with Tether Group. The €575 million in funds are intended to boost Northern Data’s investment in cutting-edge hardware, which is vital for advancing the next generation of generative AI.
The firm noted that the investment by Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer in the crypto space, reinforces Northern Data’s position in the expanding HPC landscape. It will enable Northern Data to scale its generative AI cloud service provider offerings. The surging interest in generative AI has exerted pressure on data centers, precipitating a scarcity of space and driving up infrastructure expenses.
Northern Data believes this is a critical move as demand for computational power continues to climb. Tether’s foray into the HPC arena through this financing aligns with a broader strategy of supporting infrastructure critical to AI and blockchain technologies. Echoing the sentiment of strategic expansion, Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino stated:
Tether Group is proud to support Northern Data Group in its ability to provide customers access to flexible, energy-efficient high-performance computing infrastructure.
Through its subsidiary, Taiga Cloud, a generative AI cloud service provider, Northern Data Group supplies energy-efficient computing power to businesses and research institutions, powered by the latest NVIDIA technology. The news comes after Tether’s significant investment of 0 million in Nvidia’s H100 GPUs, signaling a major move into the AI hardware market.
This development is in line with Tether’s recent acquisition of a 20 percent stake in Northern Data, an investment that followed its venture into bitcoin mining and adding BTC to the company’s balance sheet, among others. The company released its assurance opinion report, examined by BDO, earlier this week.
What do you think about Northern Data securing a loan from Tether to expand HPC services? Share your thoughts and opinions about this subject in the comments section below.
Evergrande’s Economic Tremors Trigger Bank Run in Northern China
Several reports say that the major Chinese real estate developer Evergrande’s downfall triggered a bank run in northern China last week. The bank run began after rumors spread that the financial institution, Bank of Cangzhou, allegedly loaned billions to the struggling company. This development came on the heels of an Evergrande announcement about the detention of its founder, Xu Jiayin.
Evergrande’s Crisis Spills Over, Sparks Bank Run in China’s Cangzhou Prefecture
Evergrande, the Chinese real estate giant, filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection in a New York court on Aug. 18, 2023. The company expanded quickly during China’s real estate boom and was once among China’s top real estate developers.
However, its aggressive growth was financed by significant debt, and by 2021, it amassed more than 0 billion in debt and liabilities. Before its fall, concerns about significant financial fallout resonated both in China and globally.
The implosion of Evergrande isn’t just a blip; its magnitude resonates deeply within China’s economic fabric. Furthermore, its tentacles of debt extend to banks in nations like Australia, the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and beyond.
Notably, both CNN and Asia Times chronicled a surprising bank run at the Bank of Cangzhou, sparked by contagion rumors. Such panic withdrawals are seldom seen in China. The financial institution, with its multiple branches, is situated in a prefecture approximately 100 miles from Beijing.
The bank run news recently went viral on social media as people shared pictures and videos of the event on platforms like X (formerly Twitter). The state run media outlet Yicai reported that police in Cangzhou detained a number of individuals for spreading rumors and a police guard is stationed at the bank’s entrances.
The Bank of Cangzhou further assured the public of the safety of their deposits. To underscore its solvency, reports indicate that hefty stacks of yuan were prominently displayed in the bank’s lobby. The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) swiftly provided emergency financial support to the bank, sources say.
China last witnessed bank runs in April 2022, as four rural banks in Henan province suspended withdrawals, impacting .5 billion in deposits. New Oriental Country Bank of Kaifeng, Shangcai Huimin County Bank, Yuzhou Xin Min Sheng Village Bank, and Zhecheng Huanghuai Community Bank initially cited “maintenance” as the cause.
However, locals soon discovered these institutions were under a financial probe. In a parallel development, just before last week’s bank run, reports emerged of the arrest and ongoing investigation of Evergrande’s founder, Xu Jiayin.
What do you think about the Evergrande collapse causing a bank run in northern China? Share your thoughts and opinions about this subject in the comments section below.
“We Participate Directly in the Rising Bitcoin Price“ — Aroosh Thillainathan, Founder and CEO of Northern Data
Northern Data, the specialist in high-performance computing, is one of the world’s leading providers of infrastructure for Bitcoin mining and listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (XETRA: NB2, ISIN: DE000A0SMU87). We spoke with founder and CEO Aroosh Thillainathan about the prospects for Bitcoin and the growth expectations for Northern Data.
Q: Mr. Thillainathan, Bitcoin is gaining more and more attention, not the least because of the enormous rise it is currently experiencing. The Bitcoin price has more than doubled within the last few weeks. Where is this momentum suddenly coming from?
A: There are many reasons: Payment companies such as Paypal and Square have recently announced that they will enable their customers to pay with Bitcoins in the future, thus opening up a mass market for the digital currency. In addition, the first US companies are currently starting to shift their currency reserves into Bitcoin – first and foremost the US software company Microstrategy. The US capital markets players are also beginning to discover Bitcoin. Just recently, JP Morgan published that their strategists believe Bitcoin can reach 6,000 and higher in the long term as it begins to compete with gold as an asset class. And there are rumors that various central banks are buying Bitcoins on a massive scale right now. The very fact that there is no one reason is why, for me, the current rally in the Bitcoin price is on very solid footing.
Q: In your view, does Bitcoin have the potential to become an asset class like gold, stocks or bonds?
A: It already is! While the utility of Bitcoin as a payment instrument is still in its infancy, Bitcoin is already the “better gold” for the new generation of investors. It is a safe way to store value, especially in these current times with more and more governments expanding their money-printing activities.
Q: But gold has been accepted as a so-called “store of value” for thousands of years, while Bitcoin is only a little older than 10 years.
A: Bitcoin, however, has a number of advantages over gold: It is free and easier to store, and it allows its owner to access, share, or transfer assets from anywhere in the world at any time. Imagine, for example, on a Sunday afternoon you want to transfer gold for the equivalent of 5,000 euros from Frankfurt to Hong Kong within minutes. What is completely impossible with gold is no problem with Bitcoin. And in terms of effort, it is also completely irrelevant whether you transfer Bitcoins for five thousand or five million euros, which of course makes Bitcoin particularly attractive for professional investors. And finally: It is a question of the collective acceptance of Bitcoin as a “store of value”, and in my opinion that is now a widely accepted fact.
Q: So, you see Bitcoin as a new asset class. Doesn’t the Bitcoin price fluctuate too much for that?
A: Let’s remember spring of last year, when many stocks plummeted by more than 50% within a few days. Bitcoin does not fluctuate any more than other volatile asset classes. Due to the money-printing orgy we are currently seeing, any and all asset classes promising returns will remain volatile in the future. And, by the way, fiat money – which is the euro, dollar and so on – is also very volatile. In fact, the USD probably lost about 20% of its value in the last 12 months. At least. Most investors just don’t see it yet, because they take exactly this fiat money as a reference value, which creates the illusion that fiat money is stable.
Q: Do you see further upside potential in Bitcoin?
A: Bitcoin offers investors the opportunity to escape the devaluation of their fiat currencies through the massive injection of money by almost all central banks. It is estimated that in the year just ended, more than 22 percent of the US dollar in circulation was printed by the Federal Reserve. So, when you realize that almost a quarter of all existing US dollars were created in the past year, you realize the immense potential of Bitcoin as a store of value. We are only at the very beginning.
Q: Doesn’t mining threaten Bitcoin with a fate similar to that of the US dollar?
A: Not at all. Since the final Bitcoin quantity is limited to 21 million pieces, it stands in sharp contrast to conventional currencies, which suffer from unlimited money creation by central banks. Currently, 18.81 million Bitcoins exist, with 900 new Bitcoins added each day through mining. In 2140, the last few Bitcoins will be mined, and from then on there will be no more new Bitcoins. The scarcity of Bitcoin is its ultimate value proposition.
Q: If Bitcoin establishes itself permanently as a new asset class, will we all invest some of our wealth in Bitcoin at some point?
A: Absolutely. And as Gorbachev so beautifully said, “Those who are late will be punished by life itself”! A striking example: Last year, more than 24 million people had assets of more than one million dollars. Thus, absurdly, it will never be possible for every millionaire to own one single Bitcoin, because there are simply not enough Bitcoins.
Q: With all these positive prospects for the future, isn’t there the potential for setbacks? Bitcoin is still not regulated everywhere, and couldn’t negative assessments by the SEC, for example, put an abrupt end to the price upswing after all?
A: The further regulation of Bitcoin is, of course, an issue that could once again threaten setbacks. And as I said, investors need to be prepared for volatility, not just in Bitcoin, but in all asset classes. The financial world has changed dramatically in recent years. On the subject of regulation, Bitcoin has already reached a scale where it can no longer simply be “banned.” Large publicly traded companies in the US are currently already starting to invest significant portions of their cash reserves in Bitcoin, and large investment companies such as Fidelity and the first insurance companies such as MassMutual have also discovered the cryptocurrency. That Bitcoin will be further regulated globally is evident, and when this process is completed in the coming years, Bitcoin will have fully arrived at the mainstream. It is also interesting to look at markets where Bitcoin is already regulated. For example, Bitcoin has been officially recognized as legal tender in Japan since 2017. The experience with it has been extremely positive and gives a good indication of what we can expect in other markets. I would sum it up like this: More regulation will make Bitcoin stronger in the long run, not weaker.
Q: Your company Northern Data itself is one of the largest providers of Bitcoin mining infrastructure. How long have you been active in this area?
A: We turned to Bitcoin mining with our team at a very early stage, almost eight years ago at this point. Bitcoin mining is highly competitive. Only those with the most efficient infrastructure can survive the fierce competition. Due to our very early entry into this market we were forced to develop our own proprietary solutions to the challenges that come with it. Bitcoin mining is one of the first and largest applications of high-performance computing (HPC), in which hundreds of thousands of highly specialized computers solve complex computational tasks in parallel. This presents extreme challenges, in part because the chips used have special requirements in terms of their power consumption and cooling needs. We therefore had to develop our own proprietary innovations in the area of cooling and needed a special AI to control thousands of computers in parallel. But this pressure to develop our own innovations at an early stage is the basis of our success today. Today, we serve multibillion-dollar corporations and offer full-scale Bitcoin mining services: from purchasing the hardware, to setting it up, to running it successfully in our data centers.
Q: How does your company benefit from the positive development of Bitcoin?
A: On one hand, we are experiencing massive demand for our infrastructure, such that we are currently opening a new data center site every few weeks. The demand is simply overwhelming, and we have long waiting lists. As we enter into long-term contracts with our customers and they pay us upfront to build the infrastructure, this creates a massive global infrastructure for HPC in a comparatively short period of time. This infrastructure is owned by us and will enable us to achieve great growth for many years to come. With individual customers, we have also agreed on variable remuneration components in addition to the basic remuneration, with which Northern Data itself participates directly in the rising Bitcoin price. Due to the current development, we are talking about a very significant additional upside here, which we have not yet taken into account in our public forecasts.
Q: Nevertheless, your public forecast already shows an almost unbelievable growth…
A: That is correct. In the current year, we expect to generate revenues of between EUR 350 million and EUR 400 million with EBITDA of between EUR 100 million and EUR 125 million, based purely on the contracts that are already concluded and excluding the aforementioned performance-related compensation.
Q: And what does it look like for 2022 and beyond?
A: Since we are currently in a high-growth period as mentioned above, the 2021 figures are only the basis for continued high growth in the coming years. In the future, in addition to the establishment of Bitcoin as a new asset class, we will benefit very strongly from the other applications in the area of HPC, which are just now starting to become relevant. While currently, the majority of our customers are still Bitcoin miners, our customer base should be much more diversified by the end of this year, for example with customers in AI, deep learning, research, or rendering.
As I said earlier regarding the Bitcoin price, we are just at the beginning. This is also true for Northern Data, both in terms of our operational numbers and our company valuation.
Northern Trust Testing Fractionlized Bonds on Blockchain
The U.S.-based custody bank is looking to offer fractions of tokenized bonds to retail and small professional investors. n
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Northern Trust Hands Off Blockchain Solution to Fintech Firm
n Northern Trust has transferred its private equity blockchain solution to the fintech company Broadridgen
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Northern Trust Aids Hedge Funds in Cryptocurrency Investment
Yet another firm from traditional markets has stepped into the cryptocurrency boxing ring, with Northern Trust recently diving down the metaphorical rabbit hole that is blockchain.
Legacy Markets Firm to Make a Foray into Blockchain and Crypto
As per an exclusive Forbes article, Pete Chercewich, the President of Northern Trust’s corporate and institutional services division, has revealed that the financial giant has begun to operate in the blockchain industry.
Since the start of 2018, Northern Trust, which manages over trillion in investor assets, has been assuring that a hedge fund’s financial reports are consistent with those seen at the fund’s cryptocurrency custodian.
The firm is also aiding funds by evaluating their crypto investments, while also conveying the gathered information to a fund’s clientele. Despite the fact that Nothern Trust has historically dealt with legacy market-related investments, the firm has been able to seamlessly transition to this nascent industry, introducing new administration services. Some of the notable cryptocurrency-focused services include NAV (Net Asset Value) pricing arrangements, anti-money laundering (AML) compliance, asset existence validation, and crypto-trade reconciliations.
Most recently, the Chicago-based financial services provider has been working with three “mainstream hedge funds” to diversify their portfolios into crypto, sadly not making Forbes privy to which funds they were collaborating with.
Oddly enough, in direct contradiction to the Forbes interview, Chercewich told Bloomberg that his firm has also begun to develop a method of reliably securing crypto assets. The Northern Trust executive also noted that the plan is to offer custody support at industry-low fees, beating out the relatively high cost of alternative institutional-focused security solutions. He stated:
“The fees right now the custodians are charging are pretty high, not the same fees that we get –- ultimately, I believe unsustainable, because it needs to be an efficient model.”
While the financial institution seems to hold high hopes for their custody service, it was revealed that a fully-fledged release won’t be unveiled for at least another 12 months.
Northern Trust Remains “Cautious,” but Will Forge Ahead with Crypto-Related Products
Speaking with Forbes’ journalists, Chercewich expressed his excitement for tokens for “anything today,” stating:
“You can take anything today. You can take movie rights, you can take all sorts of entities, and you can create a token for those… We have to be able to figure out how to hold those tokens, value those tokens, do those things.”
Although it wasn’t explicitly stated, this statement alludes to his hope in seeing the worldwide adoption of utility and securities tokens alike. The Wall Street executive also declared that he could see governments eventually issue fiat as a digital currency or blockchain-based asset. Chercewich stated:
“I do believe that governments will ultimately look at digitizing their currencies, and having them trade kind of like a digital token — a token of the U.S. dollar — but the U.S. dollar [would still be] in a vault somewhere, or backed by the government. How are they going to do that? I don’t know. But I do believe they are going to get there.”
Despite holding a traditional outlook on the financial industry, the 129-year-old firm seems to see some promise in blockchain-related technologies and applications. While the firm’s June report noted that it still holds a “cautious” sentiment regarding the cryptocurrency space, the work Northern Trust has conducted in this industry tells a different story.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Northern Trust, PwC Launch ‘Instant’ Blockchain Audits
Rather than waiting for periodic reports, auditors of private equity funds on Northern Trust’s blockchain will get the data almost immediately.
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