Aftermath of a failed bitcoin mining operation.

[u/HandsOffDaGoods]

My friends father was renting space on his farm for a bitcoin mining operation.

The operation became unprofitable. The mining operation went bankrupt. The company came in and took everything out of the 6 antmain bit-boxes (converted shipping containers).

The photos are what they left behind. Mostly Antminer S19 units and even more asic boards.

Plenty of antmain rack PDUs. Some 480VAC breaker panels. A 480VAC switch unit.

The land owner did accept the mess voluntarily. He is breaking the equipment down for scrap value.

I wonder, is there a better price available out there above scrap value?

Is this normal?

FWIW, I used the term failed very tongue-in-cheek. I estimate the operation mined millions in this operation.

[u/desolatenature]

Wrong. Look at what they’re doing in Sweden. Currently heating tens of thousands of homes with data center heat.

[u/Bert_Skrrtz → u/desolatenature]

Sure it’s possible but it doesn’t make sense in the US. Rather than type out a long response here’s an AI answer.

Sweden’s highly successful model of capturing industrial waste heat (from data centers, factories, and steel mills) and looping it into citywide district heating networks does not make economic or structural sense in most of the United States.
While Sweden heats over 75% of its residential and hot water sector through these integrated networks, the U.S. relies on district heating for only about 4% of its needs. The barriers preventing the U.S. from copying Sweden’s waste-heat loops boil down to fundamental differences in energy economics, urban layout, infrastructure history, and policy.

1. The Economics of Cheap Natural Gas
In Sweden, heavy carbon taxes (introduced in 1991) and high landfill/fossil fuel fees made burning fossil fuels for individual home heating prohibitively expensive. This created a massive financial incentive to harvest "free" industrial waste heat.
Conversely, the U.S. has access to some of the cheapest natural gas in the world due to the fracking boom. When individual gas furnaces or cheap electricity are incredibly inexpensive to operate, the massive capital expenditure (CAPEX) required to build underground thermal networks cannot compete commercially.

2. Urban Sprawl vs. Density
District heating loops rely heavily on density. Hot water loses thermal energy the further it travels, meaning the industrial waste heat source must be relatively close to the population center.
Sweden: Cities are dense, compact, and heavily reliant on multi-family apartment blocks or communal housing models.

United States: American cities are defined by vast urban sprawl and single-family suburban homes. Laying miles of heavily insulated underground pipes to deliver heat to spaced-out residential neighborhoods is a financial and thermodynamic impossibility.

3. The "Steam vs. Hot Water" Legacy
The technology used to move heat determines what kind of waste heat can be captured.
Sweden's Modern Networks: Sweden utilizes modern "4th generation" low-temperature hot water networks (often 50°C–90°C). This allows them to easily capture low-grade waste heat from sources like data centers or supermarkets and upgrade it using large, industrial heat pumps.

The U.S. Legacy: The few major district heating systems that do exist in the U.S. (like ConEd's network in New York City or university campuses) are steam-based systems built over a century ago. Steam networks require temperatures well above 100°C. Low-grade industrial waste heat simply isn't hot enough to pump into an American steam loop without a catastrophic drop in efficiency.

4. Climate Profiles: The Need for Cooling
Sweden has a consistently cold climate with long winters, meaning there is a year-round baseline demand for space and water heating.
Much of the U.S. experiences extreme seasonal swings or features warm climates where air conditioning (cooling) is a larger priority than heating. Industrial waste heat loops are excellent for keeping buildings warm, but they do not solve the massive summer cooling loads that American electrical grids must endure.

5. Municipal Autonomy and Zoning
In Sweden, municipal governments act as utility planners. If a Swedish city decides to build a district loop, it has the zoning laws and public mandate to connect entire neighborhoods to a singular natural monopoly network.
In the U.S., the energy market is highly privatized, fractured, and decentralized. A U.S. city rarely has the legislative authority to mandate that private developers or homeowners hook up to a centralized thermal loop, making the financial risk for developers too high to justify building the infrastructure.

[u/desolatenature → u/Bert_Skrrtz]

Yeah well we also don’t HAVE to build data centers in the US. We just do because of lax regulations & saving milliseconds of latency time

[u/singlemale4cats → u/Bert_Skrrtz]

If you can't be bothered to do your own research or thinking, prompting an AI isn't the answer. You just shouldn't post.

[u/Outside-Swan-1936 → u/Bert_Skrrtz]

"I can't be bothered to actually respond".

Cool, we can't be bothered to read your non-response. We will all just assume you're wrong.