A Russian Company Is Opening a Mining Farm in the Arctic

Oct 14, 2020 at 17:43 UTC.BitCluster, a cryptocurrency mining company in Russia, is setting up shop where few dare to wander.

A new mining farm above the Arctic Circle, in the industrial area of Norilsk in the Taymyr Peninsula, will provide 11.2 megawatts of power for mining bitcoin.

The farm will be working as a "Mining hotel," meaning that it will be hosting application-specific integrated circuits for customers, charging them for electricity consumption.

The farm will occupy the land of the now-closed nickel smelting plant owned by Nornickel, the Russian mining and smelting corporation that has been actively exploring the blockchain and crypto space, and that plans to sell tokens backed by metals in the U.S. and Switzerland.

BitCluster's farm will expand its capacity to 31 megawatts next year and will use the venue of the former nickel plant, company spokesperson Tatyana Arestova told CoinDesk.

150 ASICs of Bitmain's latest model S19 are on their way to Norilsk.

BitCluster is now working on the logistics to move that client's mining machines from Sichuan province to Norilsk, where the price for electricity is quite cheap, at less than 4 cents per kilowatt/hour.

"So they will have their electricity tariffs raised. Chinese miners will start moving around, looking for better tariffs." BitCluster might have a small bunch of its own ASICs in the venue, too, but that will be a small part of the entire farm, Arestova said.

The plans got the blessing from Norilsk's local authorities.

Alexander Pestryakov, the chairman of the Norilsk city council, said the mining farm's launch is "Only the beginning of the digital reality of Norilsk," as quoted by Norilsk's newspaper, Zapolyarnaya Pravda, which earlier announced the opening of the mining farm.