Frank Holmes has had a long career as Money Manager: Financing Gold Mine Companies; To get involved in the creation of Gold Royalty Companies; Development of financial products for the aviation industry-all this with US global investors (growing), the listed asset management company he has been leading since 1989.

He is also chairman of Hive Blockchain Technologies (HIVE), a Bitcoin mining company with a market value of $ 345 million and a rapid expanding footprint in Paraguay, thanks to a recent deal where the company acquired facilities previously owned by another miner, Bitfarms. The company was born, he said, after trying to launch a spot of Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) in 2017.

Hive has been green from Get-Go. Its first facility used geothermal energy in Iceland; Another used hydropower in Sweden, only 100 kilometers south of the Arctic circle. Now the company expects to have approx. 430 Megawatt (MW) infrastructure underway during the third quarter of 2025 – which probably means energy to operate a city of 86,000 homes.

Holmes talks at BTC & Mining Summit at Consensus 2025 in Toronto on 14-15. May.

At the forefront of the event, Holmes shared his thoughts on HIVER’s situation in the wider mining sector, the company’s decision to reuse its GPUs for AI purposes and what the future has.

This interview is condensed and edited for clarity.

Coindesk: Hive has recycled some of its GPUs to AI. Can you tell me about it?

Frank Holmes: At one point we had 130,000 AMD chips and we were mining (ETH). We were about 6% of the world’s Ethermining, and it was very profitable. When it went away [with Ethereum’s transition to Proof-of-Stake in 2022]We had this expertise in GPU chips and we replaced a lot of our AMD chips with Nvidia chips. It allowed us to start going down the AI ​​path.

The difference between a basic ASIC miner and Nvidia chips is like running a bronco and a Ferrari. The engine delicacy, the engines, all the leverage that goes into a high -performance car – all this relates much more to a GPU. When Antminers S21 Pros shows up, it takes us six hours to unpack them and connect them. When the Nvidia chips emerge, like an H100, it’s six weeks before you built the brain and it works. So it’s a completely different skill set.

When you build infrastructure for Bitcoin mining, you spend a million dollars per Megawatt electricity. When you enter High Performance Computing (HPC), the facilities need so much redundancy that you spend $ 10 million per day. Megawatt. It is excluding the equipment. You have much higher requirements for logistical technique and you have much higher capital costs.

When you want to buy energy for Bitcoin mining, you can take variable energy and the real key part is the cost of the energy. In Sweden we can go from 30 megawatts to three megawatts in 15 seconds. So we are able to give back energy or put it on.

When you are HPC, you need to be up all the time and then you need this backup of generators, batteries. Stability of energy is much more critical for HPC than it is for Bitcoin mining. So you have a matrix that you are trying to play with.

Does Trump Affects Customs Customs Strategy Your Operations?

We listen to the United States because it is so important for branding and liquidity. But we have never done anything in the United States because we are always concerned about the overreaction of regulatory agencies in Washington. The weapons basically the accountants to go after anyone who was in crypto. So we said, ‘Let’s just stay neutral in this jurisdiction.’ Then Trump won, so we decided to move our head office over. It is strategic because if your head office is in the US, you qualify for many of the different indices. We don’t have mining in the US yet.

But you have expanded significantly in Paraguay.

I think what happened in Paraguay to Bitfarms is that they underwent a certain distraction with their CEO [left]. There was a vacuum. Then Riot (Riot) tried to come in to buy and control them. During this trouble -perioding, the Paraguayan government put a duty on Bitcoin mining workers, which was really very strange, but it happened and it will fall away, I think next year. It was all disturbing to the new CEO, and he would turn to the United States, so they merged with strongholds (SDDE) to basically become an American company, as a reverse takeover.

They still have 80 megawatt electricity in Paraguay, but most of the operations we are now taking over. We end the construction and we are very excited about it. We already have a few machines working. We have the largest growth profile in 2025 of all Bitcoin mine workers. We haven’t done any of these funky convertible bonds to buy Bitcoin. Most of them paid much higher prices. No, we haven’t done that because we know how unstable it can be. Each time everyone starts doing this binge debt – yes, before, by 2021, it was all to buy mining equipment. This time it’s all to buy Bitcoin. Bitcoin then goes to a correction and they are all strangled. 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, shared 50/50 with Brazil. It is 14 gigawatts and as eight kilometers long. It’s so huge. If Paraguay does not use the electricity, Brazil will keep it. Well, Bitcoin mining workers don’t. We help build their infrastructure and they get paid US dollars each month. So it’s a win-win for the Paraguayan government and it’s a win-win for HIVE shareholders because we want to stay focused on green energy.

Are there other jurisdictions you want to expand to?

We look at suggestions from East Africa. Especially Ethiopia has a lot of stranded electricity. Some of the other miners have already entered this area. They got all these cheap money from the World Bank and other institutions, and they built the dams, but then they did not build power lines throughout the economy. It’s a big expense. We have a very clear vision to go from 6 EH/S to approx. 25 EH/SI for the next nine months.

How do you see the mining sector’s situation right now?

I don’t think it’s healthy. You need to be aware that there is a change for many of the great miners. Larger US companies are not really in mining. They are predominantly focused on adding bitcoin to their balance. They all emulate Michael Saylor’s business model. But in order for Bitcoin’s ecosystem to work, you need to have growth in the nodes. You need to have growth in mining so that we become even more decentralized. Some of the companies are likely to invest more in Lightning Network or in Ordinals infrastructure to differentiate themselves.

Which Bitdeer (BTDR) is doing [with ASIC manufacturing] is really smart. The founder was also co -founder of Bitmain. So when I come in with a new piece of technology that is very energy efficient with regard to Joules that is consumed, I think it is very good and competitive for the capital markets.

Bitcoin mine workers will undergo a process that happened with Gold Miners. When GLD came out of gold, suddenly there was a separation – gold stocks against GLD. In this century, Gold Bullion has surpassed the S&P 500 by a wide margin. But only the quality gold stocks, the Royalty Gold stocks, have actually surpassed. One of the things that Hive has always had is the old royalty model with high revenue per year. Employee so that we can handle these features and do not have to review this panic with large redundancies.