Bitmain has unveiled its newest machine, the Antminer S19XP.

The manufacturer of the most popular brand for application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) Bitcoin miners introduced the machine at its just-concluded World Digital Mining Summit 2021 which ended on Nov 10 in Dubai. 

The series, whose rig’s hashrate will be 27% more efficient than Bitmain’s current top machine S19 pack, will also use 27% less energy than the most previous model while consuming 140 watts less. 

Its launch comes at a time when crypto mining industry insiders have suggested that ASIC miners are set to become more expensive in the coming year. 

Several factors were cited for the projected price increase. They include the rising Bitcoin price, the semiconductor shortage, supply chain issues, and manufacturing hiccups. Another is the coming to an end of the panic-selling that followed China’s mining ban which saw the resale market flooded with old and new rigs thus dropping their prices. 

It should also be noted that Bitmain’s rumoured moving of its manufacturing capabilities out of mainland China has been considered as a factor too. 

Bitmain confirmed last month that it will stop shipping its Antminer mining machines to mainland China (excluding Hong Kong and Taiwan) in compliance with Chinese anti-crypto mining laws. As the manufacturer of the most popular brand for ASIC Bitcoin miners, its relocation is suggested to make the prices of ASICs – which were already expensive to acquire and run – become even more expensive with time.

The S19 machine variants (the S19, S19J, S19 Pro, and S19J Pro and now the S19XP) are hard to beat. They produce more hash rate for less electricity which counts for the cost per kWh. The ASIC will use TSMC’s 5nm chips unlike the older S19 models which use 7nm chips.

According to Luxor Mining, which provides analysis, data, and hash rate insights, Bitmain has started taking bulk pre-orders for the new machine with a price of $75/TH ($10,500 per machine) – about a  28% discount compared to other S19 model’s current market rates. 

The bulk pre-orders are “only available to the big boys” – publicly traded companies and other industrial-scale players – who buy thousands of miners at a time to get priority and a discount on prices, the industry insight provider states. It adds that the preorders are also cheaper of the S19XP’s eight to 10 month lead time that miners will face from purchase to deployment.

In its latest newsletter, Luxor Mining assumes that the machine would probably sell for higher prices when it enters the resale market especially if Bitcoin’s price continues to run. It expects that with the shutting down of its mainland China factory, Bitmain will have to rely on its Malaysian and Indonesian facilities to produce the S19 XP hence cannot be sure of the estimated number of machines to be rolled out in the upcoming year. 

While the first batches of the Antminer S19 XP are expected to be shipped in Q3 2022 sometime between July and September, Luxor Mining cites two key developments that could affect supply delivery time. They are the record setting cargo ships waiting for port clearance in the US and the Asia-to-US ocean freight costs which have reportedly been up by nearly four-fold from last year.