Traditional data centers and proof-of-work crypto facilities have some obvious differences. For one thing, crypto centers do not build for redundancy, leading to a consensus that these high-compute facilities don’t meet the necessary criteria to be considered a general purpose data center.
Mining for cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, requires specialized, high-performance hardware to accurately solve mathematical problems in the shortest time possible by using computer algorithms. The demand for this equipment and space increases each day. Facilities designed and built to run mining operations must offer some of the most efficient cooling and power density architecture to manage the computing power. The massive power consumption of this industry is estimated to be roughly the same as some small countries. To be fair, it’s about on par with the amount of power the data center industry consumes. But, what makes this so mind-blowing is that, while data centers serve most of the global population, only a few mining operators protect the majority of the decentralized network.