U.S. technology companies are pursuing energy assets held by bitcoin miners as they race to secure a shrinking supply of electricity for their rapidly expanding artificial intelligence and cloud computing data centers. Those data centers are driving the fastest U.S.
FILE PHOTO: A group of buildings housing cryptocurrency miners sits in the foreground of a power generating station at the Scrubgrass Plant in Kennerdell, Pennsylvania, U.S., March 8, 2022. REUTERS/Alan Freed/File Photo power demand growth since the start of the millennium, outpacing grid expansions and leaving giant technology companies, like Amazon and Microsoft, to scavenge for vast amounts of electricity.
Currently, data centers account for about 1 per cent-1.3 per cent of global electricity consumption, versus crypto mining's roughly 0.4 per cent, according to the International Energy Agency. That disparity is expected to grow. "We've gotten a lot of interest from everyone from an Amazon or Google," said Kerri Langlais, chief strategy officer of bitcoin miner TeraWulf, which has a site in upstate New York that is capable of up to 770 megawatts .
About 90 per cent of the country's bitcoin mines can be constructed in six to 12 months, versus three years for a more sophisticated data center, Bradford said. This year, EZ Blockchain had a 10-MW project in the works with a South Carolina utility until the utility contracted for 100 MW with a hyperscaling AI company.
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