–BitFury, the bitcoin-mining operation based in Amsterdam, has announced a new round of fund raising, and plans to build another data center in the country of Georgia, as the firm looks to stay ahead of its peers in a highly competitive and fast-changing mining industry.

The firm announced on Thursday that it has raised $20 million in a third round, from investors including DRW Venture Capital, iTech Capital, and Georgian Co-Investment Fund. It raised $20 million last summer as well, and has raised $60 million since its founding in 2011. The company did not disclose its valuation.

Even though the firm says it is profitable, the money is necessary because of the high costs of mining and the extreme competition, said George Kikvadze, BitFury’s vice chairman. Running the data centers and acquiring more and more powerful chips is an extremely expensive proposition.

“You need access to capital,” Mr. Kikvadze said, “as well as execution on silicon. That’s super important. If you don’t come up with the chip in time, and develop your data centers on time, you’ll be squeezed out.”

There’s been a shake-up in the mining industry over the past year, as the costs of the mining arms race, as well as the missteps typical in a nascent industry, have crushed a number of players, like CoinTerra, Aquifer, BitMine and Butterfly Labs. Mr. Kikvadze reckoned that a year ago, he had about 20 competitors. Now, he says, “it’s BitFury versus the Chinese pools.”

As bitcoin has grown over the years, the mining industry has gotten progressively more competitive, with the dominant form of computing power increasing from desktops to graphics cards to mainframes to dedicated semiconductor chips of increasingly smaller and more powerful designs. BitFury released a 28 nanometer chip several weeks ago, and in that time it’s seen its share of the rise from about 6% to 16%, making it currently the largest private miner.

Other miners, like KnCMiner, also have 28 nanometer chips (KnC has a 20 nanometer chip as well), and the arms race is taking that down very near what most consider the limits for chips. “Until we get to 16 nanometers, this race is going to go on,” Mr. Kikvadze said.

Of course, once you have a chip, you need the rest of the operation. BitFury recently shut down a data center in Finland that wasn’t cost effective, and is planning to build a new one in Georgia. It already has another data center in Georgia, as well as one in Iceland, and is looking to build what would be a fourth in either the U.S. or Canada.

The other big issue in the mining sector is the debate over the block-size limit. Some are pushing to raise the limit past the current 1 megabyte, but doing so changes the economics of mining, and raising the limit to eight or 20 megabytes, to say nothing of even larger sizes should bitcoin keep growing, would be likely to drive out even more competitors.

That puts a company like BitFury in an unusual place. As a private, for-profit enterprise, less competition is a good thing. But this particular industry, bitcoin, makes a philosophical stand over centralization. Indeed, the fact that changing the block size would centralize mining into even fewer hands is one of the chief arguments of the crowd lobbying against the increase.

BitFury is taking a middle path of sorts, in favor of increasing the block size, but only at a gradual pace. “We’re willing to sacrifice short-term gain for the long-term sustainability of the industry,” Mr. Kikvadze said.