Frank Holmes had a long career as a currency manager: Financial gold mining companies; Participation in the creation of gold royalty companies; Developing financial products for the plane industry-all of these along with US global investors (Grow), the public that the Asset Management Firm has been changing since 1989.
He is also the chairman of the Hive Blockchain Technologies (Hive), a Bitcoin mining company with $ 345 million market capitalization and a rapid expansion of footprints in Paraguay, thanks to a recent deal in which firm has earned facilities previously owned by another miner, Bitfarm. The company was born, he said, after he tried to launch a place that was exchanged by the Bitcoin (ETF) exchange fund in 2017.
Hive is green from get-go. Its first facility uses geothermal energy in Iceland; Another used hydro-power in Sweden, just 100 kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. Today, the company expects to have approximately 430 megawatts (MW) of infrastructure and runs in the third quarter of 2025 – means enough energy to powerful a city of 86,000 homes.
Holmes Speak At the BTC & Mining Summit at Consensus 2025, in Toronto on May 14-15.
At the event lead-up, Holmes shared his thoughts about Hive’s situation within the broader mining industry, the company’s decision to recycle its GPUs for AI’s purposes, and what’s future.
This interview has been condemned and edited for clarity.
CoinDesk: The Hive re -repurcing some of its GPUs for AI. Can you tell me about that?
Frank Holmes: At one time we had 130,000 AMD chips and we were mining ether (ETH). We are about 6% of ether mining in the world and it is very useful. When that was gone (with Ethereum’s move to proof-stake in 2022), we had this expertise in GPU chips and we replaced many AMD chips with Nvidia chips. We were allowed to start to go down the AI path.
The difference between a major ASIC Miner and Nvidia chips is like driving a Bronco and a Ferrari. The motorcycle, the machines, all the gearing that enters a high performance of the car – all of which is more associated with a GPU. When Antminers S21 Pros appear, it will take us six hours so they will not be removed and stabbed them. When Nvidia chips appear, such as an H100, six weeks before you build the brain and it works. So this is a completely different skill set.
When you build an infrastructure for bitcoin mining, you spend a million dollars per megawatt of electricity. When you go to High Performance Computing (HPC), the facilities require so much redundancy that you spend $ 10 million per megawatt. That does not include the equipment. You have higher logistics engineering requirements, and you have higher capital costs.
If you want energy source for bitcoin mining, you can get variable energy, and the real major part is the cost of energy. In Sweden, we can go from 30 megawatts to three megawatts in 15 seconds. So we are able to restore the energy, or take it.
When you are HPC, you need to be up all the time, and so you need to have this backup of generators, batteries. Energy stability is more critical for HPC than Bitcoin mining. So you have a matrix that you are trying to play.
Does the Trump management tariff approach affect your operation?
We listen to the US because it is very important for branding and liquidity. But we did nothing in the US because we always remember about the overwhelming regulation agencies in Washington. They usually armed with auditors to follow anyone in crypto. So we said, ‘Just stay neutral in this area.’ Trump then won, so we decided to move our head office. That’s strategically, because if your head office is in the US, you qualify for many of the different indexes. We have not yet had mining operations in the US.
But you expand greatly to Paraguay.
I think what happened to Paraguay in the Bitfarms they went through some chaos to their CEO (left). There is a vacuum. Riot (riot) then tried to come in to buy and control them. During that riot, the Paraguayan government put a tariff on Bitcoin miners, which is really unique, but it happened, and it would lower it, in my opinion, next year. It was all restless for the new CEO, and he wanted to pivot in the US so they combined Stronghold (Sigd) that actually become an American company, like a reverse takeover.
They still have 80 megawatts of electricity in Paraguay, but most of the operations we take today. We finish construction, and we’re excited about it. We have some working machines. We have the largest growth profile in 2025 of all Bitcoin miners. We haven’t done any of the fun replaced debentures to buy Bitcoin. Most of them pay higher prices. No, we didn’t do that because we know how much it will change. Whenever it starts to do this loan purchase – well, before, in 2021 it is all for the purchase of mining equipment. At this time, it was all for the purchase of Bitcoin. Then Bitcoin goes to a correction, and they are all scared. We just don’t want to be in that position.
We really see the opportunity in Paraguay. It has the largest dam in the western hemisphere, sharing 50/50 in Brazil. It is 14 gigawatts and is like eight kilometers long. It is very broad. If Paraguay does not use electricity, Brazil will get it. Well, Bitcoin miners don’t do that. We help develop their infrastructure, and they pay the US dollar each month. So this is a win for the government of Paraguayan and it is a win for Hive shareholders, as we want to stay focused on green energy.
Are there any other jurisdictions you want to expand?
We look at the proposals that come from East Africa. Ethiopia in particular has a lot Stranded electricity. Some of the other miners went to that place. They earned all this cheap currency from the World Bank and other institutions, and they built the dams, but then they did not build power lines throughout the economy. This is a huge cost. We have a very clear vision to go from 6 eh/s up to 25 eh/s in the next nine months.
How do you see the situation of the mining industry today?
I didn’t think it was healthy. You need to recognize that there is a change for many large miners. The major US corporations are not really on expanding mining. They are predominantly dedicated to adding bitcoin to their sheet of balance. They all release Michael Saylor’s business model. But for the Bitcoin ecosystem to work, you need to have a growth in the nodes. You need to have a growth in mining operations to make us more decentralized. Some companies may possibly invest more on the Lightning Network or in ordinal infrastructure to change themselves.
What does BitDeer (BTDR) (In ASIC manufacturing) is really smart. The founder is also a Bitmain co-founder. So into a new piece of technology which is very energy efficient in terms of the joules consumed, I think is very good and competitive for capital markets.
Bitcoin miners will go to a process that happened to gold miners. When the GLD came out for Bullion, all of a sudden there was a separation – gold stocks compared to GLD. In this century, the Gold Bullion released the S&P 500 by a wide margin. But the quality of gold stocks, the stocks of gold royalty, are really -outperformed. One of the things Hive always has is the old royalty model of high income per employee, so we can deal with these down drafts and there is no need to go through this panic of great disappearance.
