ERCOT interconnection surge and grid needs

This week in bitcoin mining news, ERCOT sees a 266 GW of interconnection requests in 2026, IREN closed a $2.3 billion convertible note offering, and GPUs are leaving ASICs in the dust.

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Welcome back to The Mining Pod! Today, Ethan Vera, COO of Luxor, joins us as we dive into MicroBT’s Whatsminer M70 launching into a challenging ASIC market, IREN’s $2.3 billion convertible note offering, the precarious state of hashprice, Luxor’s new GPU hardware sales business, the staggering 270% leap in ERCOT interconnection requests, and the controversial Cat bitcoin fork proposal aimed at filtering ordinals / inscriptions.

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**Notes:**

- Hash price is below $40 per second

- Three negative difficulty adjustments

- Ercot requests leaped 270% in 2025

- 73% of requests from data centers

- IREN raised $2.3B in convertible notes

- M70 efficiency: 12.5 J/TH

00:00 Start

02:35 Difficulty Report by Luxor

07:26 IREN note

10:44 M70 launch

20:02 Luxor launches GPU trading

27:12 ERCOT LL requests up 270% in 2025

34:10 Cry Corner: another filter fork proposal

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