Riot Platforms (RIOT -1.49%) was a popular stock on the first day of the trading week, with investors pushing its price almost 9% higher. A new deal with a peer helped support the surge, as did a climbing Bitcoin price. By contrast, the dour S&P 500 index slipped by 0.5% on the day.
Riot is buying thousands of new miners
That morning, Riot announced that it executed a purchase option for a collection of miners, essentially powerful specialty computers used to "mine" (create) cryptocurrencies. Under the terms of the arrangement, Riot will buy 66,560 such rigs from Chinese supplier MicroBT.
Riot will pay $290.5 million for its new machines, excluding taxes, fees, and adjustments. That's roughly the amount of cash it had on hand at the end of its most recently reported quarter.
Investors were clearly happy about the fact that the company is aggressively pursuing expansion of its mining capacity. They're also likely bullish about the fact that the news came as Bitcoin rose to new recent highs. In afternoon trading on Monday, the leading digital coin peaked at over $42,000 apiece before retreating somewhat.
The soul of the new machines
Any publicly traded company expanding its capacity in any industry will earn attention from the market. It's no different for Bitcoin miners, as, of course, the more they mine, the more they can earn (all things being equal, of course). $290 million-plus is a lot of greenbacks, though, so the pressure will be on for the company to get those new devices onstream and producing as fast and as efficiently as possible.
