Converted bitcoin mine

The catch

You are buying a building designed for machines nobody minded losing. Mining tolerates outages, poor cooling and low reliability because a lost hash is worth nothing; a lost training run is worth a great deal. The retrofit is real work, and the sites worth converting were largely converted first — quality falls as you move down the list. Deployment still runs 60-70% faster than greenfield, which is the whole argument.

What it actually decides

If your model is training in 2027 rather than 2031, this is one of very few honest answers. It is a power-date decision wearing a real-estate transaction.

Weighed against

• Converted bitcoin mine vs Grid interconnection — Energised land you can buy this year against a queue position for the 2030s.
• Converted bitcoin mine vs On-site natural gas turbines — Two ways to skip the queue. One is a retrofit; the other is a turbine slot that may be 2031.

Others in where the power comes from

• Grid interconnection — 4-5 years typical, approaching 5 on average
• Nuclear PPA (existing plants) — 1-3 years to contract; the plant already exists
• Small modular reactors (SMR) — 2030s for meaningful capacity
• On-site natural gas turbines — 12-24 months, the fastest firm power available
• Behind-the-meter generation — Depends on the generation, but it skips the queue
• Solar + battery storage — 18-36 months

Sources

• www.datacenterknowledge.com
• insights4.vc