Hashrate Utilization: How Big Miners Run Their Sites

Ten thousand servers was Cline Kezar's biggest year at Hewlett Packard. At Core Scientific, he said, they deploy that many in a week.

Kezar, senior vice president of data center services at Core Scientific, spoke on the Mining Operations: In The Weeds panel at Mining Disrupt Miami 2024, recorded June 24 to 26, 2024. Curtis Harris moderated. Beside Kezar were Cassandra Divis of Marathon Digital Holdings, Tim Sandau of Foundry, and Bo Ginn of CleanSpark. When they spoke, Bitcoin traded at $61,272. Today it trades at $82,531.

Kezar said Core Scientific ran about 745 megawatts and more than 200,000 machines at seven sites in six states. At that scale, he argued, uptime is the wrong number. A machine can be powered on with hashboards down. So Core Scientific tracks hashrate utilization: how much of its hashrate is really hashing, and how fast repaired machines come back. With hashprice under five cents, he said, "it is absolutely paramount that you keep everything up and hashing as much as possible."

Divis described Marathon's version, hashrate hours. A site with one exahash should log 24 hashrate hours a day, and Marathon compares that day over day and month over month, across sites with different curtailment.

Tracking the machines themselves is its own job. Core Scientific built a platform in-house to follow every unit, on the shelf, in the repair center, in the logistics hub, or on its way to being decommissioned. Fall behind, Kezar warned, and you fail your audit.

Bo Ginn of CleanSpark talked about people. CleanSpark trains new technicians to the NFPA 70E standard and runs a standardized course before anyone works on the floor. It operates mainly in Georgia and Mississippi, and Ginn called the job labor-dominant, so applicants visit a site before the late interview rounds.

Tim Sandau of Foundry compared a site without written procedures to backyard football, and said every new site gets its own custom SOPs. He also told the room about a site call where the first item was a cat that had kittens in the facility. He had no procedure for that.

Divis put the work in plain terms. Technicians haul 35-pound machines all day, and in her words, "that's the proof of work that goes into keeping our hashrate up." On one early container visit, the airflow pulled her hair into a miner.

Kezar's closing point: "There is no already set playbook. We are developing a playbook every single day."

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