USDT issuer Tether Limited spent $420 million to purchase 10,000 H100 chips from Nvidia. GPUs will be the price for a 20% stake in the mining company Northern Data, which will offer them for rent to AI startups, Forbes writes.
Tether will become a shareholder through Damoon, an Irish-registered firm. Northern Trust will receive a 70% stake in it with an option to buy the remaining 30%. Financial terms are not disclosed.
Northern Data CEO Arush Thillainathan explained that Tether had money and managed to “intercept” the chips.
Forbes drew attention to the fact that the mining company had previously resorted to schemes for purchasing equipment through offshore structures, and the regulator had questions about the quality of its financial reporting.
The publication recalled that a fierce confrontation broke out in the tech industry around the $40,000 chip amid the AI-related hype.
Northern Data followed companies like Coreweave, Hive, Crusoe and Hut 8, which, after the transition of Ethereum to Proof-of-Stake, reoriented the equipment for mining the second largest cryptocurrency by capitalization in a new direction.
“A number of new specialized cloud service providers have formed,” — said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
As a result of the Tether deal, Northern Data will receive ~2% of expected H100 shipments this year, making it the largest operator in Europe after Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle.
The 10,000 chips mentioned will exceed purchases by Saudi Arabia (3,000 chips) and the UK (£100 million is earmarked for this purpose).
Tether previously reported $850 million in net profit in the second quarter. According to the document, 85% of USDT collateral comes from cash and cash equivalents.
Let us recall that in May, the company’s CTO, Paolo Ardoino, said that the issuer’s high profitability makes it possible to consider new business areas.
Later it became known that Tether invested $1 billion in a Bitcoin mining project in El Salvador.
Found an error in the text? Select it and press CTRL+ENTER
ForkLog newsletters: keep your finger on the pulse of the Bitcoin industry!