High-performance computing (HPC) player Northern Data AG (XETRA: NB2) has extended a customer contract of a volume of ASIC chips worth US$100 million. 

The existing customer, from the bitcoin mining sector, is making use of an extension option, which it drew at the end of the year. 

The order of ASIC chips corresponds to an additional capacity of more than 200 MW, which will be allocated to Northern Data’s up-to-five new Scandinavian and Canadian data centre locations, among others. 

The expansion of these new HPC data centres is being accelerated due to the massive growth in customer demand.

According to sources, Northern Data might be in the cusp of closing a deal to acquire a data centre facility in the Nordic region to cope with market demand.

The need for bitcoin mining infrastructure is growing rapidly, especially due to the fast-developing acceptance of bitcoin as a new asset class. 

The company’s CEO Aroosh Thillainathan, said: “The upsizing of this customer order is a great testament to our technology-leading solutions for bitcoin mining infrastructure. With this customer, we will directly participate in the rising bitcoin price and thus have an additional upside that we had not previously factored into our forecast for 2021. 

“However, bitcoin mining is only one of the many growth drivers in our business. In addition to the accelerated expansion of our bitcoin mining activities, we are also benefiting from rapidly developing customer demand in other application areas of high-performance computing. 

“Just in early December, we started commissioning our GPU cluster, which will allow us to benefit from the exploding demand for HPC services for artificial intelligence, deep learning, research and rendering.”