Mining farm

Modern bitcoin mining is an industrial business. Farms range from shipping containers next to a power source to warehouses of hundreds of megawatts filled with rows of ASICs. Their success depends on securing cheap, reliable electricity, often through long-term contracts or a direct connection to a power plant, plus cooling, network connectivity and staff to maintain thousands of machines.

Site selection follows energy prices and regulation. After China banned mining in 2021, capacity moved to the United States, especially Texas, and to Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada, the Nordic countries, Paraguay and Ethiopia, among others. Many large farms are run by listed companies, and from 2024 several began converting part of their sites into data centres for AI computing, which pays more per megawatt.

Farms face local opposition over noise, especially air-cooled sites near homes, as well as grid concerns and changing rules on energy use. Their economics are exposed to halvings, bitcoin's price and power markets, and a concentration of hashrate in a few jurisdictions raises questions about the network's resilience.