A state-owned nuclear power plant in Russia may soon fuel a bitcoin mining hub, Cointelegraph reports.
Last year, the country’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom opened a mining farm near the Kalinin nuclear plant in Udomlya, 200 miles northwest of Moscow. The company spent more than $4.8 million building the 30-megawatt facility, according to Sergei Nemchenkov, the head of data centers and digital products at Rosenergoatom, a Rosatom subsidiary.
Rosenergoatom is planning to capitalize on the opportunity to sell additional electricity to heavy users and rent space for their equipment, similar to a data center the firm built near the plant, Nemchekov said.
“Both data centers and miners are large energy consumers with a stable demand,” Nemchenkov said. “For us, it’s a way to diversify.”
Rosatom is the first big government-related entity to embrace miners in Russia, and with plans to eventually open 240 megawatts or more of its power from several locations to the industry, the company could become a notable player on the global market.
To put that number in perspective, Chinese mining giant Bitmain‘s facility under construction in Rockdale, Texas, is expected to start with a capacity of 25 to 50 megawatts and eventually expand to 300 megawatts. Another facility being built in the same town would start at 300 MW and eventually go up to 1 gigawatt; both are claiming the title of world’s largest.
The Kalinin plant (built in 1974 and named after a statesman who was the formal head of the Soviet state from 1919 until 1946) is another example of miners in Russia nesting close to old industrial sites, like the abandoned factories in Siberia that are attracting miners from all over the world.
In Udomlya, a rectangular field of about 215,000 square feet is expected to fit up to 30 containers, each with room for almost 400 individual mining computers, Rosenergoatom said.
