Frank Holmes has had a long career as a silver manager: finance gold extraction companies; get involved in the creation of gold royalty companies; Develop financial products for the air transport industry – all this with US global investors (GROW), the listed asset management company that he has been running since 1989.
He is also president of Hive Digital Technologies (HIVE), a Bitcoin mining company with a market capitalization of $ 345 million and an expanding footprint in Paraguay, thanks to a recent transaction in which the company has acquired installations previously owned by another minor, Bitfarms. The company was born, he said, after trying to launch a Bitcoin Fund (ETF) Bitcoin exchangers in 2017.
Hive was green from the start. Its first installation used geothermal energy in Iceland; Another used hydroelectricity in Sweden, just 100 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. Now, the company plans to have around 430 megawatts (MW) of operational infrastructure in the third quarter of 2025 – which means enough energy to feed a city of 86,000 houses.
Holmes will be expressed at the BTC & Mining Summit at consensus 2025, in Toronto from May 14 to 15.
In the approach of the event, Holmes shared its reflections on the place of Hive in the broader mining industry, the company’s decision to recycle its GPU for AI purposes and what the future has in store for us.
This interview was condensed and published for more clarity.
Coindesk: Hive reused some of his GPUs for AI. Can you tell me?
Frank Holmes: At one point, we had 130,000 AMD chips and we were ether (ETH). We were about 6% of the ether mine in the world and it was very profitable. When it’s gone [with Ethereum’s transition to Proof-of-Stake in 2022]We had this expertise in the GPU chips and we replaced a large part of our AMD chips with Nvidia fleas. This allowed us to start going down the AI path.
The difference between a basic ASIC minor and Nvidia chips is like driving a Bronco and a Ferrari. The delicacy of the engine, the engines, all the gears that enter a high performance car – all this relates much more to a GPU. When the S21 pros antiminers arise, it takes us six hours to unpack and plug them. When Nvidia fleas appear, like an H100, it is six weeks before building the brain and it works. It is therefore a completely different set of skills.
When you build infrastructure for bitcoin extraction, you spend a million dollars per megawatt electricity. When you enter high performance IT (HPC), facilities need redundancy as long as you spend $ 10 million per megawatt. This excludes equipment. You have much higher logistics engineering requirements and you have much higher capital expenses.
When you want to find energy for Bitcoin exploitation, you can take variable energy and the real key part is the cost of energy. In Sweden, we can go from 30 megawatts to three megawatts in 15 seconds. We are therefore able to restore energy or take it.
When you are HPC, you have to get up all the time, and you must therefore have this backup of generators, batteries. Energy stability is much more critical for HPC than for Bitcoin extraction. So you have a matrix with which you try to play.
Does Trump administration ‘pricing strategy have an impact on your operations?
We listen to the United States because it is so important for brand image and liquidity. But we have never done anything in the United States because we are always concerned about the overcoming of regulatory agencies in Washington. They mainly armed the listeners to continue anyone who was in crypto. So we said: “simply resume neutral in this jurisdiction”. Then Trump won, so we decided to move our head office. This is strategic, because if your head office is in the United States, you are eligible for many of the various indices. We do not yet have mining operations in the United States.
But you have developed considerably in Paraguay.
I think what happened in Paraguay in Bitfarms is that they have undergone some distraction with their CEO [left]. There was a void. Then Riot (Riot) tried to come and buy them and control them. During this period of turbulence, the Paraguayian government put a price on Bitcoin minors, which was really very bizarre, but it happened, and that will fall, I think, next year. Everything was disturbing for the new CEO, and he wanted to pivot in the United States, so they merged with Stronghold (SDIG) to become essentially an American company, as a reverse takeover.
They still have 80 megawatts of electricity in Paraguay, but most of the operations we take now. We finish the construction and we are very excited. We already have some machines that work. We have the largest growth profile in 2025 of all bitcoin minors. We did not do any of these funky convertible dens to buy bitcoin. Most of them paid much higher prices. No, we did not do this because we know how volatile it can be. Whenever everyone begins to make this frenzy debt, well, before, in 2021, everything was to buy mining equipment. This time, that’s it to buy bitcoin. Bitcoin then goes to a correction, and they are all strangled. We just don’t want to be in this position.
We really see the opportunity in Paraguay. It has the largest dam in the Western hemisphere, shared 50/50 with Brazil. It is 14 gigawatts and eight kilometers long. It’s so huge. If Paraguay does not use electricity, Brazil can keep it. Well, bitcoin minors don’t do that. We help build their infrastructure and they are paid each month. He is therefore a winner-win for the Paraguayan government and he is a winner-win for Hive shareholders, because we want to remain focused on green energy.
Are there other jurisdictions you are looking for to develop?
We are considering proposals from East Africa. Ethiopia in particular has a lot of blocked electricity. Some of the other minors have already entered this area. They obtained all this inexpensive money from the World Bank and other institutions, and they built the dams, but they did not build the electric lines of the economy. It is a big expense. We have a very clear vision of going from 6 eh / s to around 25 eh / s in the next nine months.
How do you see the situation of the mining industry right now?
I don’t think it’s healthy. You must be aware that there is a change for many great minors. Large American companies are not really in mining expansion. They mainly focused on adding bitcoin to their balance sheet. They all emulate the business model of Michael Saylor. But for the Bitcoin ecosystem to work, you must have a growth in nodes. You must have growth in mining operations so that we become even more decentralized. Some companies should probably invest more in the Lightning network or in ordinary infrastructure to differentiate themselves.
What Bitdeer does (BTDR) [with ASIC manufacturing] is really intelligent. The founder was also co-founder of Bitmain. So, by coming with a new technology which is very economical in energy in terms of joules consumed, I think it is very good and competitive for the capital markets.
Bitcoin minors will go through a process that has arrived at gold minors. When the GLD came out for ingots, all of a sudden, there was a separation – golden stocks against GLD. This century, gold bars surpassed the S&P 500 by a large margin. But only quality golden stocks, gold stocks of the royalties, have in fact surpassed. One of the things Hive has always had is the old model of income fee high by employee, so that we can face these sketches and not have to go through this panic of great layoffs.
