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Acrohash's Austin Plan: Shut Down for the Grid, Overclock in the Tank
At Mining Disrupt Miami 2022, Acrohash's Tommy Li laid out a 100 MW Austin build, grid shutdown pledges, overclocking results and a one-gigawatt target.
A hundred megawatts outside Austin, built to switch off the moment Texas needs the power back. That was the plan Tommy Li brought to Mining Disrupt Miami 2022. Li, head of business development at Acrohash, spoke at the conference held July 26 to 28, 2022. Bitcoin was trading at $22,964 that week.
On October 12, 2026 it was $83,316. Li started with the market. The bear market and the energy prices that followed the Russia-Ukraine war had knocked machines offline. In his words, "we've seen a decrease of around 30 percent of the bitcoin network's hash rates since its peak in june." His case was that mining had become consolidated and exclusive.
An ordinary buyer faces the energy rate, the maintenance bill and the know-how needed to keep a miner running, so most people buy bitcoin on an exchange instead. Acrohash said it would carry those costs and sell access to the hashrate. The first site is in Austin. Li said it was chosen for its locational marginal pricing and for being close to several high-voltage transmission lines, and far enough from homes to keep the neighbors undisturbed.
Acrohash planned to join Texas demand response programs. When the grid is stretched, he said, the facility can shut down at once and hand up to 160 megawatts back. Phase one was three air-cooled buildings and one immersion building, 100 megawatts in all, on 10 acres with its own substation. Phase two would take it to 160.
The immersion buildings were the engineering bet. With the whole board under liquid there are no hot spots, the machines run cooler and quieter, and there is room to push them harder. Li said the overclocking results were promising: "We've seen increases in hashrate of up to 30 or more." Then came the retail angle. Acrohash was building a cloud mining product that, in Li's words, would "fractionalize bitcoin miners and be able to provide them to individual users." A buyer would own a slice of a machine instead of a whole one.
The roadmap ran well past Austin: a 70 megawatt site in Oklahoma, talks with Paraguay's state utility ANDE for 100 megawatts of hydropower, and a target of passing one gigawatt by the first quarter of 2024. Those were targets set on stage in 2022, and the session itself reported no results against them. The full story is on Intelligence Disrupt at intelligencedisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.