My Road Trip to Giga-Watt Mining
Upon returning from New York City, I found that I was on a guest list to attend an open house at a mining/blockchain hosting facility called Giga-Watt. Then I remembered signing up with Daria from their marketing company at Consensus 2017 — and yesterday was the day before their June 2nd WTT token launch.
Since I live in Seattle, I’m certainly best situated to check this out. I jumped in the old Audi S4 cabriolet and sped out to Wenatchee, Washington, just three hours east of Seattle. Or four hours — something blocked I-90 around Cle Elm as usual.
After passing through gorgeous gorges, apple orchards and vineyards, their office confused me at first — an executive airport. I only knew I was at the right place because when I rolled up, I saw the prototype version of one of their new smaller mining pods just down the hill.
I attended the tour as the lone business blockchain guy, along with three bitcoin mining enthusiasts who knew more about ASICs than I did. Welcomed by Mitchell, our open house host for the day, we talked about Giga-Watt’s upcoming plans to expand into smaller pods across a large field near the airstrip this location is perfect because it gets constant wind through the Columbia River Gorge which acts as natural cooling source, saving significant power costs.
Speaking of power costs, they get the cheapest base electricity cost I’ve ever heard of, as low as 2.8 cents/KwH (see their site for hosting/facility plan prices). That sounds crazy at less than 1/3 of most people’s energy cost, but there are a couple of the world’s strongest hydroelectric dams right nearby — so renewable power source and transmission cost must be very low. Either way Eastern Washington seems ideal for facilities for that reason.
We met business development VP Adam West, who described the demand for mining services and hardware as far exceeding the supply. Much of their hosting and mining capacity is booked up through July — in addition hardware such as GPUs are becoming constrained. This may be why they are in the midst of an expansion backed by a token offering officially launching June 2 called WTT (for “WaTT” symbolizing the copious power required for mining).
Dave Carlson, Giga-Watt’s CEO, came to meet us. A former Microsoft technical leader who got into Bitcoin as early as 2010, he’s been building out capacity here, which incidentally helps keep USA in the mining game when most small operators can’t afford enough hashing power to compete for block rewards globally.
As far as this token offering is concerned, he said many of the early buyers of these tokens were already informally in the mining club — miners who want to reserve some of that capacity Giga-Watt will be adding for themselves. More like a timeshare or golf club membership approach. That’s interesting because they can uniquely offer actual rental time in real facilities to offer as token backing.
Now we’re back in our cars to go see one of their larger, current facilities in operation. It’s no GooglePlex or NSA data center, but there sure are plenty of GPUs and drives running in here, and a lot of wind.
The noise level was high but not unbearable. Come to think of it, it does sound like I just got out of a concert. This building seems to be about 10 times the size of one of their new, more efficient Pods they are designing for the field in Wenatchee. But it operates on the same principle: Set up a wall of condensating fabric on the left, bring in a ton of power, put a ton of computers on the networked racks, and then set up a wall of fans to suck the cooled air through the other side.
The air stayed relatively cool in there, although it was only 75F outside, so not so hot of a test. These computers are working extremely hard, therefore they can fail quite easily, which is why there is a workshop for engineers to fix the units, and lots of spare parts around. While any part could fail, the little electronic fans seem to break down the most. They’re just not made for an unlimited amount of stress and use. There was a large bunch of discarded fans, as well as stacks of new fans and components ready to be plugged in.
This day was very educational. Thanks to everyone I talked to. Anyway, Giga-Watt seems like a tight operation.
Jason sez: “Check Giga-Watt out if you’re into this sort of thing!”
