Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center
41 comments
·December 22, 2025theamk
kelnos
I would definitely call that an inefficiency. Heat is wasted energy that in theory could be turned into useful work. The electricity used that created that heat (that is, not including the electricity that "went to" the computations themselves) ended up serving no useful purpose.
It would be wonderful if we could capture that waste heat and give it a useful purpose, like heating homes, or perhaps even generating new electricity.
(And this is before getting into the fact that I believe mining cryptocurrency is a wasteful use of electricity in the first place.)
kiba
All computations eventually becomes heat. There is no computers that doesn't generate heat.
We can generate less heat per computation but it eventually cannot be avoided.
tbrownaw
> The electricity used that created that heat (that is, not including the electricity that "went to" the computations themselves) ended up serving no useful purpose.
Computational results do not contain stored potential energy. There is no such thing as energy being "used up" doing computation such that it doesn't end as waste heat.
stouset
> wasted energy that in theory could be turned into useful work
Even if turned into useful work, the end result of that work is still ultimately heat.
dangalf
Technically it is inefficiency. The electricity should be doing computer things. Heat is wasted electricity. Just there's not much the data centre could do about it.
mr_toad
There’s a minimum level of energy consumption (and thus heat) that has to be produced by computation, just because of physics. However, modern computers generate billions of times more heat than this minimum level.
RhysU
It'd be super fun to take that as an axiom of physics then to see how far upwards one could build from that. Above my skills by far.
stouset
Even if the computer does perfectly-efficient computer things with every Joule, every single one of those Joules ends up as one Joule of waste heat.
If you pull 100W of power out of an electric socket, you are heating your environment at 100W of power completely independent of what you use that electricity for.
robkop
Interesting question - how much will end up as sound, or in the ever smaller tail of things like storing a bit in flash memory?
geoffschmidt
Heat is not by itself waste. It's what electricity turns into after it's done doing computer things. Efficiency is a separate question - how many computer things you got done per unit electricity turned into heat.
userbinator
I wonder if there's enough heat being produced for it to act as a district heating plant.
duskwuff
Rockdale is a small town of ~5000 residents. Even if it were practical to install district heating - which I don't think it is - there certainly isn't demand for hundreds of megawatts of it.
hephaes7us
There absolutely is, but of course it's nonzero cost to capture.
timeon
Not sure what your point is. With POW inefficiency is by design.
edoceo
You got the point. It's "by design" - you've both said it.
nh23423fefe
a home can leak heat to the environment because of bad insulation. a datacenter doesn't leak heat because leaking is normatively bad.
e-dant
This life is needlessly absurd.
Why does this even exist?
And yes, I get what mining is and I get what the blockchain does. I’m saying that proof of work is absurd.
kanemcgrath
I always wondered if anybody has calculated how much of our global heating could be attributed, if any at all, to every electronic device, server, and engine outputting heat as a byproduct.
TGower
I did a quick alalysis and it actually matched the ~1.5 degree celcius rise pretty accurately. It required a bunch of incorrect simplifying assumptions, but it was still interesting how close it comes.
Estimated energy production from all combustion and nuclear from the industrial revolution onwards, assumed that heat was dumped into the atmosphere evenly at once, calculate temperature rise based on atmosphere makeup. Ignores the impact of some of that heat getting sinked into the ground and ocean, and the increased thermal radiation out to space over that period. In general, heat flows from the ground and ocean into the atmosphere instead of the other way around, and the rise in thermal radiation isn't that large.
On the other hand, this isn't something that the smart professionals ever talk about when discussing climate change, so I'm sure that the napkin math working out so close to explaining the whole effect has to be missing something.
Waterluvian
Some days I just can’t get over how we’re just the dumbest ##^*ing species to ever visit space.
Oh let’s look at what the humans are up to with their climate change problem. Oh wow they’ve got giant data centers at work on the problem. I guess maybe it’s worth the extra heat. Let’s see what they’re calculati— nope they’re just collecting and trading numbers.
ramblerman
> Some days I just can’t get over how we’re just the dumbest ##^*ing species to ever visit space
I also think we are pretty dumb. But what reference point makes you think we are either smarter or dumber than other spacefaring species
Waterluvian
There is none. I just need to believe intelligent life trends much higher than this.
inatreecrown2
funny how somehow similar this image looks to that of a pc motherboard.
vondur
Wow. Is there still enough money to be made in crypto to justify this kind of investment?
andai
So I don't have any context for this. The article says it uses as much power as 300,000 homes. Is that a little? Is that a lot? How much does one steel foundry use?
Edit: One steel foundry uses about 3,000 more than that, according to my napkin math
sowbug
You can multiply your own power bill by 300,000 if money is a more relatable unit.
msisk6
This was previously the location of an Alcoa aluminum smelter which used something around 1000+ MW. And that's why the crypto farm is there -- it already had sufficient electrical capacity to the site.
Folks should be happy since the crypto operation is using far less power and dumping less heat into the environment that the industrial operation that was previously there, but datacenters seem to be a trendy thing complain about at the moment so here we are.
dajt
Where is the upside here? An alu plant probably provided more jobs and produced something of actual utility. This is burning power for no benefit to society.
It's burning less power than before, but it's not producing anything of value.
The world cannot reasonbly run without alu, it got along better without crypto currencies.
msisk6
Oh, I agree. I lived nearby (working for ERCOT; the Texas Power Grid operator) when Alcoa was still there and was planning the shutdown. It seems about half the people in Rockdale worked for either Alcoa, the nearby coal power plant, or the nearby coal mine that fed the power plant.
I remember the local press going on about the crypto mining operation and how folks were going get high-tech jobs in this rural area of Texas. Of course it didn't go that way.
Aluminum smelting is an incredibly energy intensive operation. A lot of places in the US that used to host aluminum smelters now host large datacenters, include the Google data center in The Dalles, Oregon on the Columbia river near a hydro dam. It's a shame that Rockdale didn't get something useful like these other places.
As far as Al smelting in the US; I don't know. I'd imagine it produces a lot of air pollution by itself and uses huge amounts of power that is usually generated by cheap methods like burning rocks (coal) or large hydro operations nearby to minimize transmission costs. Then you gotta get ore to the site. The only Al smelter I recall being left in the US is up near Puget Sound in Bellingham, WA and I think it's currently shutdown.
troglo-byte
A cryptominer is a "datacenter" in the same way that a chop shop is an automotive parts supplier.
msisk6
Well, yeah. Both crypto and AI require places with cheap power to rack and stack compute and GPUs.
It remains to be seen if AI will end up being about as useful as crypto in the long run.
mmooss
A mercury refining plant or uranium enrichment facility would also be worse neighbors, but that has nothing to do with the benefits and costs of the crypto farm.
lolc
I do get utility out of aluminium.
drivingmenuts
How many people did the smelter employ vs how many people do the bitcoin miners employ?
The smelter was providing jobs that fed money into the local economy. I'm sure much less money is coming out of the mining operation.
cruffle_duffle
Not to mention the aluminum plant was making something actually useful to society at large. What is there now is a giant space heater used to scam people.
wat10000
3,000x would be 2.1 terawatts. That would require about 100 Three Gorges Dam, currently the largest generating station in the world, to power one foundry. Or about 2,100 nuclear power plants of typical size. I think your napkin math might be a bit off.
nullc
Home energy usage is knocked down people that don't that don't do anything at home and where almost their energy use is externalized (at places that make the goods they use, or other places where they spend most of their their waking hours).
So it's a useful figure if you want to make a shocking headline. "Uses as much power as infinity of something that uses no power!"
driggs
Have you considered that it's used as a unit to represent capacity of our power grid?
As in, we have now have the energy capacity for 300,000 fewer homes given this operating data center.
So not only is it a relatable unit, but it's an incredibly meaningful unit for those who care about ensuring that energy availability actually support something of value (families) rather than something wasteful (crypto mining).
"leaking" is the wrong word here - it implies some sort of inefficiency, process which is not working as well as it needs to. Leaky bucket, leaky faucet...
That's not the case here, that center is __dumping__ heat into environment - it is by design, all that electricity is being converted into the heat. By design, it's enormous electric heater.