Arizona Data Center Marketed for Bitcoin Mining Services

We’ve been doing a lot of coverage of the new market niche for data centers providers – Bitcoin mining – this week and earlier in July. In addition to CenturyLink’s deal with mining outfit CoinTerra and mining ASIC vendor BitFury’s entry into the mining data center business, another company, called NextFort, is marketing a data center as a place to host the power-hungry servers that crunch numbers to grow cryptocurrency value.

Earlier this month, NextFort announced a deal with Gray Matter Industries, a company that provides managed hosting, hardware support and services to the Bitcoin mining industry, whereby Gray Matter will use NextFort’s Chandler, Arizona, data center (just outside of Phoenix) to house its infrastructure.

NextFort will provide VPN access to the mining equipment to Gray Matter customers, enabling them to manage it remotely. Users will even be able to control PDUs their hardware is plugged into to remotely “power cycle,” or reboot their hardware. That service is available for an additional fee.

Gray Matter will handle setup and installation of equipment for users who mail it to the data center. Unlike traditional multi-year data center contracts, Gray Matter offers six-month deals to customers, which is yet another example of just how different Bitcoin mining customers are from the typical data center user.

In addition to shorter-term contracts, they extremely high power densities (mining hardware guzzles energy), a lot of cooling (it performs better and generates more revenue when cooled efficiently) and not a whole lot of redundancy. Mining hardware operators prefer tolerating intermittent outages to paying high premiums for data center SLAs.

NextFort announced completion of the data center late last year.

Here’s a promotional video tour of the facility by NextFort:

Visit the dedicated Bitcoin data center market section on Data Center Knowledge for more coverage of this space.