Building AI-Ready Infrastructure: Balancing Energy Efficiency and Growth

Throughout its history, Bitcoin has certainly shown it can sustain a rally, and now it's proving it can sustain energy as well.

Alongside industry shifts, miners are moving to renewable energy and more efficient hardware, boosting performance while cutting power use.

This shows the industry can be sustainable, especially when these ingredients are combined.

With responsible business practice.

Well, joining me to break this down this morning is Mohammed Makash Wain, president of Bitzeero Blockchain.

Mohammed, thank you so much for joining us.

So first and foremost, what does sustainable crypto mining look like at Bitzeroo and what does that really entail in practice beyond just using green energy?

Hi Remi.

Yeah, good to be here.

Um, now, at Bit zero, we first of all identify our sites with sustainability in mind in terms of the local community and in terms of the power sources.

That's ground zero of where we start our initiative in terms of sustainability.

And then further into the operations we always look to And provide services through our infrastructure to make sure that our consumption does not affect the local communities or domestic use of power in terms of increase in energy prices and other factors that we see in other places, as well as providing some sustainability for the stability of the grids in the region as we operate due to the surplus power regions that we select.

So from site selection all the way into operation, we keep sustainability in mind.

We keep the local communities in mind, we keep the power source in mind, and that's kind of what helps us to stay true to improving.

Forward with our sustainability ethos.

And for viewers who may not be as familiar, how does your approach to energy sourcing, how does it differ from, say, traditional data centers out there or even mining farms?

So when we identify a site, we look at the surrounding region, the supply of power in that region, and make sure that there is surplus power, surplus renewable power that can be consumed on an industrial scale. in a way that will not affect the local communities or the domestic users of that power.

For example, if we're consuming X number of megawatts in a certain region, we're not going to be affecting the local houses around the area in terms of Because of our consumption, their power price will go up.

That's something we don't like to see anywhere else.

That's something we, we see in other places where there was a heavy consumption on an industrial scale, but there wasn't that in mind when those developments were happening.

So we try to always stay away from affecting the average domestic user of the energy, the renewable energy to be exact, cause they could go and use other sources of energy, but that doesn't mean we're contributing to the long term sustainability of the industry.

Yeah, and Mohammed, building on what you just said this week, Apple announced it may utilize OpenAI to power Siri and across sectors as well as industries, there are concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence on the global labor markets.

So how do you approach scaling AI ready infrastructure while also maintaining that energy efficiency and staying environmentally responsible?

So we take into our into account in our developments even though we utilize them for bitcoin mining, it's always in mind to have our infrastructure from a build out point of view ready and prepared to host the demand for AI compute and in the future potentially quantum applications, and we have all the required redundancy factors and Energy connectivity factors, fiber, and other requirements for those IT compute industries.

While we use them right now for the most profitable avenue for bit zero, they are prepared and ready to serve across the board in the IT compute sector.

And that being bit zero being on a very strong growth trajectory with an abundant power envelope that it had secured, we will, we will continue to identify sites that provide the same environmental factors, and we would develop them in the same way to prepare them to basically support all the upcoming demand.

And the heavy compute requirements that are that are anticipated from AI to any new IT compute evolution that we might be seeing in the future.

Yeah, Mohammed, you just mentioned two key terms there and that is quantum computing as well as location and we know that when it comes to quantum, it is both an opportunity as well as a threat to the world's financial system, not to mention industries across the board, including crypto.

So when it comes to your new data centers, are they being built specifically for AI and HPC and what factors actually drive your location choices?

So the locations are mainly driven, like I said earlier, by the availability of surplus power, surplus renewable power that is not being consumed by any domestic use that can be consumed on an industrial scale without disrupting any other uses, as well as the growth, the capacity availability.

And when we developed the sites, we developed them in a way where they could be used for any IT computing industry such as AI, cloud, other HPC activities, including Bitcoin mining.

So our main focus is on real assets, the assets that we acquire and we build that infrastructure lasts for decades, and those assets are mostly owned in Bit zero's case, so we can always utilize those assets and the infrastructure that we build with the whole IT compute industry in mind.

Uh, to serve whatever purpose is making more sense for bit zero at the time in terms of sustainability and profitability.

And finally, Mohammed, before I let you go, if I'm understanding you correctly at this, you don't just sell lease space, you own the land, the power and the infrastructure, and this asset first strategy allows you to build digital infrastructure that's secure, not to mention sustainable and profitable.

So what would you say are the biggest infrastructure limitations that you're seeing in the current AI boom?

What I see is locations, mainly the power availability, especially on large scales, are not in locations where let's say it's strongly connected to cities or to metropolitan areas, and the constraint is really labor and workforce to move to those areas where you can.

Operate IT compute in a sustainable manner.

That is the that is the biggest challenge we've been seeing. operating those kinds of sites and in the same time having the right skill set to operate the other IT compute industries such as AI and cloud, but there's only so much power near metro metropolitan areas to also be able to remain sustainable and not affect the domestic use and the, the normal commercial use of power.

That is the biggest challenge we've seen so far.

OK, Mohammed, well, we will have to leave it there but thank you so much for joining us today and thank you so much for sharing your insights and your perspective.