BitFury looks to invest $100 million in next data center
As reported on Bitcoin news site cointelegraph.com, high-tech Bitcoin mining company BitFury is planning to add second Georgia data center, with a planned investment of as much as $100 million over a long term. Georgia is good site due to low-cost power and better temperature climate.
Though the data center has the same energy target as its previous Georgian build, the newest facility should be significantly more efficient, for a number of reasons. The first is the latest generation of custom ASICs for Bitcoin mining released by BitFur. The new 16 nm ASICs are rated at four times the processing power of the previous generation’s 28 nm process chips. The second is the result of BitFury’s acquisition of liquid cooling technology company Allied Control. Allied’s technology is a passive, two-phase immersion cooling process that is claimed to be results in a cooling efficiency increase of as much as 4000 percent.
BitFury has been very energy-aware in the placement of its existing data centers, making use of a colocation provider in Iceland and building its own data center in the city of Gori, Georgia, the latter being built with the Georgian Co-investment Fund. The nature of Bitcoin mining is one where OPEX directly impacts profitability in a very obvious manner, as the cost of power to run the Bitcoin mining operation is immediately factored into the profit on Bitcoins being generated.
