As investors get ready for the upcoming halving of Bitcoin, the United States based mining firm Riot Blockchain announced that it doubled the amount of next-generation Bitcoin miners. It has purchased 1,040 Antminer S19s this month. It made the purchase from Bitmain on May 6. The cost of the miners was $1.9 million. This follows the business's purchase of 1,000 S19 Pros on April 30.

Riot anticipates an 80 percent boost in the hash rate after it deploys the new S19s. The units will be shipped and deployed by the third quarter of 2020. The firm expects the 2,040 S19s to increase its hash rate by at least 80 percent in 2021. Altogether, Riot states that it will command a hash rate of 457 peta-hashes per second. It will achieve this with about 16.5 megawatts of electricity after all of the machines are deployed.

A Bitmain spokesperson who represents the North American branch said that the firm has been working with Riot for years. Riot's use of Bitmain's Antminer systems for operations at their data centers is a known fact in the investment community. This big purchase from Bitmain came on teh same day as the ASIC manufacturer said that it was having a lot of problems with some S17s that it recently received. Some of the miners had failure rates of 30 percent or more on the machines.

ASIC told the media that it is working on some fixes with customers who received a defective machine. It also encouraged users to contact the business directly if their machine has a problem. Riot partially relocated because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The outbreak impacted activities at its location in Oklahoma. Because of that, Riot relocated some of its new S17 miners to a facility in New York. That facility is operated by the Coin Mint mining firm. The move took place in April. Last week, a judge in New Jersey dismissed parts of a two-year-old lawsuit against Riot Blockchain. The lawsuit alleged that Riot misled some of its shareholders in 2018.