The United States will debut its first Bitcoin mining-powered data center in the first quarter of this year. The Talen Energy subsidiary Cumulus Data has finished building the Cumulus Susquehanna data center in Pennsylvania.
According to World Nuclear News, the data center will launch hosting nuclear-powered cloud computing and Bitcoin mining services in the first quarter of 2023, making it the first such service in the United States.
The Nautilus Cryptomine, a zero-carbon Bitcoin mining facility, will be built on Cumulus Data's campus in August 2021 through a partnership between Talen Energy and the American Bitcoin mining company TeraWulf.
TeraWulf anticipates that the nuclear-powered data center will "supply 50 MW of net mining capacity to TeraWulf" in the first quarter of 2023 as it is "in the earliest phases of boosting its mining activities".
The 2.5-gigawatt nuclear power reactor at Susquehanna powers the 300,000 square foot data center. Most recent data shows mining bitcoin has never been more difficult. The mining difficulty of the network reached a new all-time high of 37.59 trillion hashes on January 15, the largest jump since last November —the only time in 2022 when mining difficulty grew by a double-digit percentage.
Meanwhile, CoinWarz data reveals that Bitcoin's hash rate has steadily increased over the last three years despite briefly falling after Terra's collapse in May 2021. The Bitcoin network determines the mining difficulty every 2,016 blocks (roughly every two weeks) based on the supply and demand of miners.
Mining becomes more challenging as more miners are deployed, increasing competition to confirm a block (and receive the reward).As the difficulty rises, miners' revenues may decline if Bitcoin's price stays flat, as they will need more electricity and processing power to mine a certain amount of cash.
