Possible space available for ASIC miner hosting (in a real datacenter!)

[jamori]

Apologies if this isn't an appropriate venue for this, I just thought I'd post here to see if I could help anyone out (and I'd much rather work with HardOCP members than the types of people you often find on the 'main' crypto forums!)

I bought a bunch of ASIC miners (Antminer S9 and L3+), and was having a heck of a time finding some where / some way to run them -- so I leased some cabinets at a local tier-3 datacenter to colocate the equipment (if you're not familiar with datacenters, higher tier is better). The miner power feeds have battery backup (UPS) and generator backup. It's a "real datacenter", so is 100% air conditioned/climate controlled and kept fairly cool (low 70's Fahrenheit?), not just some dusty mining warehouse with fans and outdoor air. Basically, the nicest environment you're ever going to find for asic mining equipment.

I have 3, 42U server cabinets full of my equipment at a datacenter near me in North Carolina, and the opportunity to lease a 4th cabinet (but no more miners to fill it). Based on the power agreement with the datacenter, I have space to host 10 Antminer S9's for someone.

I'll be back at the datacenter this weekend, and would be happy to take pictures to show the existing setup.

I could probably do $160/month/S9 if all 10 miners came from one person, or a bit more for the extra overhead if you have fewer. Let me know if interested!

 

[pclausen]

Wow, data center space is expensive. My S9's consume 27.15 kWh each per day, so that works out to 814.5 kWh. At $0.10 per kWh, that's $81.45/month. So the floor space and climate control makes up the other $80 I suppose. And I'm sure they are actually paying less that $0.10 per kWh. But if you don't have the space to host those noisy S9's yourself, I guess it is not that bad of a deal.

 

[Archaea]

Isn’t that about half what they make right now?

And next month 2/3s and so on?

 

[pclausen]

Yeah, a little more than half actually. I'm at $300/month right now. I keep telling myself that BTC will soon get back up to $18k again and my S9's will get back up into the low $20's / day.

A friend of mine just got a S9 with PSU that he wants to sell me for 0.16 BTC. That's $1,488 at today's are. I kinda told him I'll take it, but I'm on the fence. My power is pretty cheap at $0.08 once I take what I generate from solar into account, so the math does work, but not if BTC keeps dropping...

 

[pclausen]

So your "next month 2/3s" comment got me looking into this a little more. It is truly is 2/3" from here on out, it's game over come July using a power cost of $0.10:

Looking at the last 30 days decline on NH:

It looks like it went from 0.0012 to 0.0010, or a 0.8333 drop each month. So plugging that into the spreadsheet, we get:

So game over come October, unless you're paying less than $0.10 per kWh.

I think I'll pass on that S9 from my friend for 0.16 BTC...

 

[jamori]

Heh, yep -- datacenter space *is* unfortunately rather expensive. Bitcoin's price fluctuates so frequently it's hard to judge based on a "current snapshot" at the low's it's currently sitting at -- three days ago the profitability projections were $400/month/unit.

As an aside, at their rated power (1325W + 10% rated losses = 1450W) -- monthly costs of just power (assuming standard 10c/kwh residential rate) is: 1.45 kW * 24 hours/day * 30 days/month * $0.10/kwh = $104.40. Add another 30% for power for A/C to cool them (yes, even in the winter! It was 35F outside and I had to turn on my a/c with just 4 of them running), and the datacenter hosted pricing really isn't looking so bad. Has anyone mentioned that these are LOUD??

Anyway, at current pricing and everything, I don't know that I'd recommend anyone go out and buy more of these miners -- but if you've already got them and are looking for a way to run them, this might not be a terrible option

 

[pclausen]

I agree it is not a terrible option, especially if you are an apartment dweller, although no one in their right mind would run S9's in their apartment, would they? Well, except maybe [H]ard forum members, haha.

On power, I track my power very closely, and a pair of S9's do right around 54.3 kWh every 24 hours:



So that's 27.15 kWh per unit per day. So 27.15 x 30 = 814.5 kWh. That's how I came up with the figure I used above. It is my actual power usage. My voltage is pretty high, it is 250 Volts and I have a 34 kW solar array, so that bring the voltage up to about 253 Volts during the day, so that helps with the efficiency.

Btw, the reason the first 3 days of the month are low, is because we had a major storm pass through and was without power for 3 days. I do have a backup generator, but it only covers the house and all the GPU rigs there, the stuff in the shop building is off-line when the power is out. So that is another advantage of a data center I suppose, you don't have to worry about power outages.