One for the gamers: Crypto mining farm perishes in conflagration in Thailand

The ongoing global chip shortage and crypto mining boom has left gamers once again struggling to find new top-end graphics cards at reasonable prices. Whether it’s stories about alleged and unreleased GeForce RTX 4090 Ti cards being abused for mining purposes (unlikely) or hundreds of RTX 3070 units stacked up without a game in sight, it seems crypto miners are snapping up any and every GPU made available to them. But of course, such enterprises come with inherent risks, as demonstrated by a farm in Thailand.

According to CityNews (via PCGamer), emergency services in the northern Thai province of Chiang Mai rushed to a building fire only to witness the destruction of a supposed bitcoin mining farm. While no people were harmed in the fire, “72 servers” were rendered completely useless by the heat, smoke, and flames. The apparent cost of the damage was two million Thai baht or around US$60,000, so about US$833 per “server” or roughly 40x GeForce RTX 3090 cards at launch price.

The images provided in the report show firefighters dealing with the aftermath, which includes documenting the damage inside. The one image of the hardware being used in the crypto mining farm does suggest that ASIC miners were being used, due to the design of the units and their farm layout (racked differently to typical GPU-based farms). Regardless of what devices were being used for the work, there will be plenty of gamers out there who will feel these particular crypto miners got a fair comeuppance.

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