A New Company Claims It’s Opening the Biggest Mining Farm in Russia

MineSpot, a company previously unknown in the crypto mining industry, said it is opening a 160-megawatt mining venue in the middle of Siberia that would be the largest mining farm in Russia.

The venue is located near the Boguchany Dam in East Siberia, in the town of Kodinsk. It will occupy the building and land of a boiler house that used to serve the dam construction site by providing heat to workers building the dam. The construction of the dam, initiated during the late Soviet era, was completed in 2015; the Boguchany Dam is now one of the major hydropower plants in Russia.

Potential clients of the farm would include both bitcoin and ether miners, said Adam Aushev, co-founder of MineSpot, so the venue will host both SHA-256 application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and graphics processing units (GPUs).

Like many other farms in Russia, MineSpot is working as a “mining hotel,” meaning it hosts its clients’ mining machines and charges them for electricity and tech support. It can also purchase ASICs on behalf of its clients, ordering them directly from a manufacturer in China such as Bitmain, Innosilicin or others, and organizing delivery so clients don’t have to manage the logistics themselves.

The mining valley

With 160-megawatt power capacity, MineSpot is going to become a new competitor to the mining farms already working in the neighboring Siberian cities of Irkutsk and Bratsk, which also rely on hydropower, but from another dam. MineSpot, however, will be the largest one, exceeding the size of the current leader, BitRiver, which has already put ASICs in more than half of its 130-megawatt farm in Bratsk.

Local logistics might make it more challenging for MineSpot than for its older peers. Aushev admits that it’s not easy to transport ASICs to the site. The road leading from Krasnoyarsk, the nearest large city and transportation hub, to Kodinsk is partly paved with stones, which makes miners worry about their mining machines getting there in one piece.

“A couple of contracts have already fallen through because of the logistics issues,” Aushev said.

He is nonetheless optimistic about the firm’s future. Aushev said he plans to get 10 megawatts of MineSpot’s power capacity booked by the end of the year.