Two cryptocurrency mining companies want to make it easier for businesses in North America to mine bitcoin.

Minnesota-based Compute North has allocated hosting facilities and 47 megawatts (MW) of power for 14,000 Whatsminer M30S mining machines supplied by New York-based Foundry Digital as part of an agreement to provide a “turnkey” hosted mining solution. (Foundry is a subsidiary of CoinDesk parent company Digital Currency Group.)

Foundry has hosted mining devices with Compute North for over a year, according to Foundry CEO Mike Colyer. This latest batch of miners sent to Compute North for hosting will be deployed in Q1 2021, at which point investors can purchase hosted machines through either company.  

In the past year, mainstream interest in mining has soared along with bitcoin’s price, causing investors to pile into public North American mining companies and prompting shares of most of these companies to handily outperform bitcoin, as CoinDesk reported. 

But an individual investor’s ability to actually mine is often severely limited by a high barrier to entry thanks to hardware and power resource costs. That barrier stands even higher now as mining machine manufacturers continue to be smothered by overwhelming demand from established players causing a shortage of available machines.

With their new agreement, Compute North’s “low” operating costs and Foundry securing access to future batches of mining machines through its partnership with leading manufacturer MicroBT, the two companies hope to be able to attract would-be miners by being able to significantly lower that barrier to entry.