Will Cryptomining Facilities Change Into AI Data Centers? (yahoo.com) 36
To capitalize on the AI boom, many crypto miners "have begun to repurpose parts of their operations into data centers," reports Reuters, "given they already have most of the infrastructure" (including landing and "significant" power resources...)
Toronto-based bitcoin miner Bitfarms has enlisted two consultants to explore how it can transform some of its facilities to meet the growing demand for artificial intelligence data centers, it said on Friday... Earlier this month, Riot Platforms launched a review of the potential AI and computing uses for parts of its facility in Navarro County, Texas.
Slightly less useless (Score:5, Insightful)
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While true, the workloads are very different from what I understand. In particular, GPUs seem to not be what is mainly used for crapto these days. For the building? Maybe. But is that enough? And will it even matter in 2 or 3 years when the hype is over because there are still no applications that would make the effort worthwhile?
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Yep, probably. But does that make it worthwhile? Seems to be a huge assumption.
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This could be good all around. (1) Crypto miners are taken permanently offline. (2) the massive data center Sam Altman wants as part of Project Stargate may be considerably cheaper and faster to roll out if they can just take over a suitable location, with power and cooling needs already accommodated. (3) The site is already zoned for a similar operation, neatly avoiding NIMBY problems. It is also likely to be close to a source of cheap electricity.
The main difference I see is that crypto mining doesn't rea
If headline asks a question then the answer is... (Score:3, Interesting)
If headline asks a question then the answer is usually no. I see this as one of the exceptions. I believe the answer is yes, bitcoin mining facilities can convert to data centers.
The fine article states that converting bitcoin mining to a data center would likely fail because a data center is more "sophisticated". What is that supposed to mean?
What is the usual time that computers last in a corporate environment before being upgraded with new gear? 2 years? 4 years? Maybe 10 years for servers, routers, switches, and the like? I don't know, the kind of IT work I do and did has been a bit out of the ordinary. If there's a bitcoin mining operation that's been running for even just a couple years then there's room for older and lower performing computers to be replaced by newer and more capable hardware. In that process there will be an opportunity to shift their operations from mining bitcoin to a related operation. Or even an unrelated operation. At it's core it seems the concern is having a building with sufficient cooling, electricity supply, and volume to house computers. If there's a climate controlled volume with lots of power then they could do a lot of things, like maybe brew beer and distill whisky, bake bread, run a laundry service, just about anything that won't raise too much dust or other nuisance for the computers in the other sections of the building.
I think of an analog of people concerned about farmers' ability to adjust to changing climate and/or changing demand for different crops. Having grown up on a farm there's a constant rotation of tractors, implements, and other equipment. One year is a newer and bigger tractor. The next year a newer and bigger plow. When the combine harvester wears out the farmer might get a cotton picker instead, with any land still set aside for corn or soybeans to be picked by a contractor. I can imagine any other business is run much the same, with incremental upgrades to systems and processes a transition to anything new is not much of a deal.
On top of changing equipment is changing of staff. If there's a auto repair shop that is looking to get in the business of servicing electric cars then when a mechanic retires then a new guy that knows EVs can be hired in his place. A quick search to refresh my memory tells me that bitcoin is now 16 years old, any bitcoin mining corporation that's been in business that long must have had some rotation of staff, and the staff they have could likely be trained on anything they need to know about data centers assuming they had enough of a base education in large computing environments to run bitcoin mining.
If there's something that could hinder a smooth transition then I'm not seeing it. Maybe someone can enlighten me on the issue.
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Network gear (route/switch/firewall) is on a 5 year EOL cycle.
You can get a bit more out of hardware load balancers (F5/A10) but not allot 6-7 at most before back-plane advances makes them obsolete.
Servers at best are 3-4 years depending on storage interfaces.
That's a mid to large DC, your standard tiny company hardware lifespan is 3 years and done.
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It is not that simple. If you have low reliability requirements, hardware can live a lot longer. The old situation where higher electricity, cooling and space needs for older hardware drove these replacement cycles are pretty much over, even if quite a few people have not yet realized it.
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If headline asks a question then the answer is usually no. I see this as one of the exceptions. I believe the answer is yes, bitcoin mining facilities can convert to data centers.
It might not be that easy. I don't think all bitcoin mining facilities needed or have the architectural redundancy components required for a data center from the start so there might even be some situation where it might not possible. For example, think of a situation where there wouldn't be any room or location to install an emergency generator or where the cost of establishing redundant Internet connectivity or sufficient bandwidth would be prohibitive or even maybe impossible to do.
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We are not talking about a regular DC here. Running LLMs is a low-reliability application. If the occasional query fails or has to be repeated on a different machine, so what?
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As you note, it's not a case where exceptionally high reliability is particularly critical on the user facing side; but when you've got racks worth of really expensive GPUs merrily depreciating you presumably want utilization as close to 100% as possible. That's not a blank check, some methods of avoiding downtime simply won't be worth the cost even for alarmingly expensive compute hardware; but it has to be more awkward to lose a bun
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Actually no. Google for example does its search engine with cheap, low-reliability hardware. The same model can be applied to running an LLM. That 100% utilization only applies when you need reliable results. LLMs are anything but reliable.
The hardware, unlikely, the space, most likely... (Score:5, Insightful)
The hardware, if it is an ASIC dedicated to breaking hashes will have little use for doing stuff with AI. However, if it is FPGA based, then that can be repurposed for matrix math, and thus be used for AI, although probably not as good as a dedicated hardware in silicon. So, when the shine comes off of BTC, the ASIC miners will have to go, but the data centers will still be quite usable.
Overall, the data centers are always going to be useful. Worst case, it can be a coloc, or can be turned into an availability zone, so that DC space is always needed for something, especially with a push for decentralization.
Re: The hardware, unlikely, the space, most likely (Score:2)
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Cryptocurrency mining requires approximately no network bandwidth compared to your average DC. That means that the mining operations could be located in places where the quality of internet access is only fair. This in turn means that a portion of these Cryptocurrency DCs are located in places where they can't get a good deal on a meaningful feed, because cheap power was the primary consideration.
FPGAs are constantly getting outdated just like the rest of the silicon, if a bit slower, and the AI state of th
There's just not any equivalence in power draw (Score:1)
Bitcoin was drawing 1000x or so AI's power demand before DeepSeek, and AI is getting optimized fast.
Re: There's just not any equivalence in power draw (Score:2)
I read G, MS, Amazon, FB, were spending combined $285 billion USD, in 2025, on nuclear reactors, to have enough energy to train their models.
I'm guessing AI is sucking a lot more energy than cryptomining.
I'm too lazy to provide references either.
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It's hard to take any projection seriously when a model can suddenly drop with a 20x power decrease.
Re: There's just not any equivalence in power draw (Score:5, Interesting)
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Even a mothballed nuclear reactor is a major project to spin back up. And, you actually have to operate it safely. The original operators are long gone. You're gonna hand it over to a bunch of tech bros and mininum-wage IT people and tell them to "just follow the operations manual"? If they screw it up, you've got another chernobyl on your hands. You can't just hit the "reset" button.
Hand-waving about "we can just spin up a mothballed
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"greenwashing"
Hdyoung has a good point too though, which is the time horizon to build a nuke plant is on the order of 5-10 years... so perhaps not a practical choice?
One thing about power plants, nuclear or otherwise, you have a predictable cash flow for 25 years, so they are relatively easy to finance... ie. you don't have to convince anyone that the business case is good. Especially if
The trick is to combine AI with CryptoMining (Score:2)
If AI and CryptoMining are combined, then we can witness the true nature of AI and Cryptomining as scams. AI hallucinates new coins, CryptoBros cash in, everyone wins.
Elon Musk is taking over the Treasury (Score:4, Informative)
Anyway he's taking over the treasury and there's not a lot of reasons for him to do that unless he wants to start forcing cryptocurrency payments via the government.
This is an astonishingly bad idea for so many reasons I don't even know where the weekend with but it does mean people are going to be forced into accepting and processing payments with cryptocurrency and so crypto is not going away.
Now our entire economy is going to collapse because of the extreme volatility that's going to introduce but that's another matter entirely.
We put carnival barkers and scam artists in charge of our entire country. Things are going to get rough. It's honestly starting to remind me of the Chinese great leap forward. A good example was Trump ordered the army corps of engineers to release the water in California. Which they had to obey and they pissed away a billion gallons of water before somebody said they needed to stop or they were going to flood some towns....
So yeah something like crypto isn't going away. It's too stupid and too scammy
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A good example was Trump ordered the army corps of engineers to release the water in California. Which they had to obey and they pissed away a billion gallons of water before somebody said they needed to stop or they were going to flood some towns....
That order was illegal, specifically because it was going to flood some towns.
Following an illegal order is itself a crime.
Re:Elon Musk is taking over the Treasury (Score:5, Interesting)
It's illegal for Elon Musk to take direct action in the US government but anyone who opposes him immediately gets fired by Trump and replaced with a crony.
I definitely don't think people realize how big of a fuck up we just did. This really is reminding me of Mao's great leap forward where you had a complete lunatic and idiot in charge of everything and everyone was afraid of standing up to them.
We will be lucky if we get out of this with just a major recession. Heck even a depression. We might be looking at the kind of food shortages we haven't seen since the fall of the Soviet Union. People do not realize how heavily involved in food production the federal government is...
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I'm highly aware, so I stockpiled beans and rice. Now I just have to worry about whether I will be able to get fuel. Or, you know, get deported for having a hispanic surname.
Stockpiling food won't really help (Score:3)
We will go through a period like Russia did where gangsters ran the country in small fiefdoms. The same as what goes on in some of the more brutal South Am
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10 years ago these same people scoffed at the transpanic and they were angry that they're elected representatives were wasting time on it. Now it's a major political issue and a huge concern for them. That's the power of propaganda
Yep. The same idiots became convinced that democrats were stealing votes because Rafael Cruz told them so.
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How is it illegal for Musk to 'take direct action in the US government'? Sounds like he's working with the approval of the government.
The direct action Musk is taking is to reduce government spending, one of the biggest contributors to the devaluation of the dollar (i.e. inflation). Thinking that is going to cause a depression and food shortages is complete lunacy.
A song for you! (Score:2)
A eye A eye Oh!
And on that farm, he had some chips
A eye A eye Oh!
With a chip-chip here and a chip-chip there
Here a chip, there a chip, everywhere a chip-chip.Oh!
Old MacDonald had a farm.
A eye A eye Oh!
AI is gobbling up energy ... (Score:2)
Someone I know works for an energy distribution company in Canada's most populous province (Ontario).
Some months ago, he was talking about the province energy uses.
Part of it were all the greenhouses growing vegetables in the southernmost part of Canada (near Leamington), and them consuming a lot of power.
He talked about the plan for deploying Small Modular Reactors (SMRs, probably referring to this announcement [ontario.ca]).
Here is the astonishing part: he said, paraphrased: "the problem is that if we deploy an SMR of