With Bitcoin mining becoming increasingly competitive and complex, industry leaders are looking to take advantage of AI data centers, but doing so poses a daunting challenge.
At the Mining Disrupt conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida this week, leading mining companies expressed the view that the transition to AI technologies requires a certain amount of skill and a cautious approach.
“In the long term, [AI] is a huge trend,” said Paul Lee, CEO of mining technology company Fog Hashing, during a presentation. “We can’t miss this. You [miners] need to get a lot of traction this year because the need for AI computing power is huge.”
In recent months, following the recent halving, when mining rewards were cut in half, and amid the fall in the cryptocurrency market, Bitcoin miners have been trying to reduce their costs.
Bitcoin miners have been interested in AI for some time. Both industries require large amounts of energy and are constantly looking for cheaper sources. Bitcoin recently traded around $87,202, roughly in line with its price over the past 24 hours, though it’s still far from the record high of over $108,000 set in January, according to data from CoinGecko.
When the price of Bitcoin falls and revenue from issuing new digital coins becomes insufficient, some miners adapt their infrastructure to meet the demand for AI.
Because they are already familiar with how data centers work, they can operate more quickly and efficiently than other AI companies. “It’s kind of like mining,” Hiveon Energy CEO Andrey Garanin told Decrypt . “A data center is just a data center.”
Finding qualified personnel is also not difficult – the industry has been around for quite some time, while Bitcoin mining is a new phenomenon, although, according to miners, there are some difficulties.
“From an infrastructure perspective, it’s completely different,” Shannon Squires of Compass Mining told Decrypt . “A Bitcoin mining rig is like a chicken coop compared to a tier-three data center — it’s night and day,” he added, noting that the setup is more complex and requires HVAC systems to operate successfully.
Bitcoin miners may occasionally pause their operations when they need to reduce the load on the power grid. Temporary shutdowns are not a problem because the network is decentralized.
But that's not allowed in AI data centers, Squires noted. “We [as bitcoin miners] are susceptible to interruptions, whereas a traditional data center has to [run] 100 percent of the time,” he added, citing the high costs of uninterruptible power supply systems.
Edited by James Rubin
Source: cryptonews.net
