The new Marathon facility, built on 20 acres next to the Hardin plant, will be Marathon’s second. It already operates a 2MW, 26,700 sq ft data center in Granby, in Quebec, Canada. According to Marathon’s site, Granby runs 1,400 Antminer S9 miners, which consume 1.3kW each. The whole facility provides 19 Petahash per second (19Ph/s), which at current rates is less than one bitcoin per day.
According to Marathon’s figures, the new facility will consume nearly 20 times as much power. It will use Antminer S19s, which consume 3.24kW, making a total of around 37MW. Marathon says this will generate 1.265 Exahashes per second (EH/s) when fully deployed next year. Marathon chairman and CEO, Merrick Okamoto confirmed that 500 of the S19 Pro Antminers have been delivered.
Marathon chairman and CEO, Merrick Okamoto, said: “The closing of this joint venture with Beowulf represents the completion of a long journey to own a Bitcoin mining facility. Partnering with an experienced independent power producer enables us to maintain control and certainty of Marathon’s energy and operational costs, at rates that represent some of the lowest in North America.”
Beowulf has been attempting to break into the data center industry for some time, back in June 2019 it decided to reconfigure its coal power plant in Somerset, New York, into a 250MW hyperscale data center. The company has said that of its 2.3GW of capacity, it has earmarked 500MW more for Bitcoin and other data center use.
Other utilities such as Greenidge Power in New York state have invested in blockchain facilities. In March Greenidge opened a 20MW mining facility at its generating station, which has transitioned from coal to gas with the option of biomass.
Read More: Bitcoin miner Marathon signs for coal-fired electricity in Montana