CleanSpark mined a bitcoin for $96,277 in the June quarter and sold it for $71,692 — a fully-loaded direct cost of 134 per cent of revenue. It is why a company that now opens every press release by calling itself “a market leading data center developer” is doing so.
Which cost you count is the whole distinction. On energy alone the mining is comfortably profitable: $44,406 a coin at 5.3 cents per kilowatt hour, against bitcoin at $77,700 today. Miner depreciation of $51,871 a coin takes the total past the sale price. The 10-Q’s answer is that depreciation is not an avoidable operating cost, which is true and not a defence of the capital.
What the quarter showed
Revenue of $138.0m against $198.6m a year earlier, and a net loss of $239.8m. Over nine months the loss is $996.9m — but $746.2m of that, three quarters, is bitcoin fair-value and collateral marks running through the income statement, not an operating outcome. The quarter’s own marks were $132.8m; add those to the reported adjusted EBITDA of minus $113.0m and it was marginally positive.
The cash is less forgiving. Operations consumed $409.3m over nine months, worse than the prior year’s $341.6m despite that being a record year. Equity fell from $2,175m to $761m. And the treasury is a seller: in August CleanSpark mined 593 bitcoin and disposed of 821, averaging $65,420 against a cost basis of $90,188.
| Cash cost to mine one bitcoin | $44,406 |
| Fully-loaded cost to mine one bitcoin | $96,277 |
| Revenue per bitcoin mined | $71,692 |
| Net loss, quarter and nine months | $239.8m; $996.9m |
| Operating cash used, nine months | $409.3m |
| Bitcoin held, 31 August | 13,703, of which 3,951 pledged |
| Power contracted, and utilised | 1,817 MW; 808 MW |
| AI capacity under signed lease | 175 MW |
| Share price, 11 Sep close | $13.67 |
The pivot is one contract and one letter
What is signed: a 175 MW lease at Sandersville, Georgia, entered 10 July, triple-net, twenty years with two five-year extensions, to an unnamed tenant described as a high-investment-grade global technology company. That is in a filed 8-K. The $6.6bn of contracted revenue and roughly $330m of annual operating income are in the press release, and the lease was not filed, so neither can be checked. Deliveries are expected in the fourth quarter of 2027.
The larger prize — up to 885 MW across 718 Texas acres — is a letter of intent and an exclusivity arrangement, not a lease. The company put it plainly on the August call: an exclusivity window, not the finish line. Texas is also mid-audit, the governor having directed ERCOT in August to verify every data centre in the interconnection queue.
The press release says the equity is funded. The 10-Q, filed the same day, says it will need to raise more.
The bear case
Dilution has moved from the share count to the overhang. Shares outstanding are down 8.6 per cent in a year, CleanSpark having spent about $605m buying stock back at roughly $14.30 against $13.67 today. But securities excluded from earnings per share as anti-dilutive have gone from 8.8m to 138.6m, a potential 54 per cent increase, and the $1.15bn of 2032 convertibles carries no capped call where the smaller 2030 tranche got $90m of hedging.
Then the governance. A $30m special dividend went in March to the chairman and chief executive, a director, an entity they control and the former chief executive, in a year with a $997m loss. Those preferred shares carry 45 votes each, about 23.5 per cent of the vote. An unquantified impairment of the Sandersville mining plant is still to come.
The bull case
The financing is genuinely good. Both convertible tranches carry a zero coupon, cash interest over nine months was $3.1m, and neither tranche matures before 2030. The bitcoin-backed credit line went from $174.5m to nil. Bitcoin is up 32.8 per cent on the June mark of $58,524, so the quarter now ending should reverse part of that loss.
And roughly a gigawatt of contracted, grid-connected power sits unused — 808 MW utilised of 1,817 — in the tightest power market in a generation, carried at little more than land and interconnect cost against a build cost the company puts at $10m to $12m per megawatt. Strip out every bitcoin and the market is paying about $4.0bn for that option. Whether that is cheap depends entirely on the letter becoming a lease.
Sources, all retrieved 14 September 2026: the 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2026 and the earnings release, both 6 August 2026; the 8-Ks of 14 July 2026 (Sandersville), 24 March 2026 (preferred) and 13 November 2025 (2032 notes); the FY2025 10-K; SEC EDGAR submissions data; the July and August operational updates; Nasdaq and Yahoo for market data; CoinGecko, Coinbase and Kraken for bitcoin. Financials are in dollars because CleanSpark is a US-listed issuer, and the price is Friday 11 September’s close. Valuation ratios and the EBITDA add-backs are our arithmetic from filed figures, not company disclosures. Contested: the earnings release prints prior-year net income and adjusted EBITDA in brackets although its own reconciliation shows both positive, and quotes working capital of $761m where that is the equity line; it says the Sandersville equity is funded while the same-day 10-Q says more capital must be raised; monthly updates report “operational hashrate” of 50 EH/s, footnoted as a historic peak, against 38.3 EH/s average operating; and Nasdaq’s market capitalisation implies 4.6 per cent fewer shares than the 10-Q cover, where we used the filing. Call quotations come from a third-party transcript, the company’s own posting being unreachable. Not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security.