addie@feddit.uk 5 days ago
especially if you have the infrastructure in place
I thought Bitcoin mining made no sense at all on GPUs any more? Unless you were ASICs then the power costs just weren’t worth it, and application-specific is part of the acronym, there. Why would these things even be able to run an LLM?
In any case, Bitcoin just needs to iterate as fast as possible in order to find a match, doesn’t really need a lot of RAM. Whereas LLMs need really large amounts - NVIDIA’s latest data centre racks have about a terabyte for a reason. Even if you had cornered the market on GPUs five years ago for Bitcoin, what use are those cards for this?
Mining hardware is shortlived. These things get outdated real fast and need to be replaced frequently. So what they do is when a mining rig is up for replacement, they just swap it out for an AI rig.
The real asset for mining is the infrastructure: rack space, access to cheap electricity, data centers. All of that is very useful for AI as well.
Some of these bought decommissioned power plants like old coal plants, so they’re getting wholesale prices for energy.
One this is all speak to convince investors to throw money, so they’ll cheer pick their interpretation.
In this case I think they refer to already having the real estate, buildings, power and cooling. So “all” they have to do is rip out their rigs and dump a bunch of nVidia gear in. All they need is just a few hundred million from some lucky investors and they will be off…
I think you misunderstand that scene. Bitcoin miners are crazy rich and most of them are investors in their own right. They don’t need outside money.
dhork@lemmy.world 5 days ago
If I read the article property, the real asset is the rackspace and power they are already leasing. They would tear out the existing Bitcoin mining infrastructure and replace it with AI servers.