3G Venture II, a California-based mining operation, recently purchased a sizable portion of an abandoned Intel plant for mining. The plant in question was made to manufacture semiconductors for Intel and was shut down in 2009.
The location of the plant makes it a tempting opportunity for 3G Venture to purchase it, as it is situated in Colorado Springs. The town boasts a lower electricity rate in comparison with the national average, with costs being 21% cheaper. The plant also has a very well-established electricity network built for Intel’s needs.
The plant has a size of 1.4 million square feet with the company purchasing 30 acres of land and 700,000 square feet for a price of $13 million. The remaining space in the facility will be leased to industrial tenants.
The on-site electricity infrastructure drew the interest of John Chen, 3G Venture’s owner, as it has a substation and dual power feeds, which is a gift for the mining operation. The operation utilizes ASICs for mining, which makes cheap electricity costs and existing infrastructure incentives for the company to move into Colorado Springs. ASICs are Application Specific Integrated Circuits and can provide hashpower many times greater than consumer grade equipment like graphics cards.
This may represent the recent importance given to mining in the cryptocurrency world, as the hashrate of the total blockchain continues to grow. In just 6 months, even as the price declined to more than half of its previous price, the hashpower of the network has almost tripled.
From about 13 EtaHash/second, the total hashpower of the entire network has gone up to 37 EtaHash/second, marking a 2.8x increase. This also significantly increases the security of the Bitcoin blockchain.