Mining farms are depopulated in Iran, while video cards are in short supply

In recent months there has been a cryptocurrency mining is back in vogue using video cards, a dynamic well known to enthusiasts and which manifested itself in a very strong mood a few years ago. The increase in the valuation of cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin in the lead, has allowed mining via GPU to return to productivity; the debut of the new NVIDIA and AMD architectures has also made it possible to achieve new levels of performance in mining, pushing towards the construction of new mining farms.

Some of these are placed in strategic environments, if they can benefit from a lower cost for electricity compared to what happens on average in the world. This is the case ofIran, a nation in which there are at least 14 official mining farms configured with the latest generation GPUs.

Such a large number, as he reports France24, is justified by the economic convenience of using electricity in this country: the price is in fact equal to 0.022 Euro per kWh, a figure that we can consider equal to about 1/10 of that required in Italy and which would allow miners to obtain a higher profit margin by repaying infrastructure costs in a shorter time.

All this happens, however, not without direct repercussions, which are of your types. The first is that of a overload of the nation’s power supply structure, which suffers from downtime problems in many areas due to the additional load required by mining farms. The overall consumption of these installations is estimated to be between 300Mw and 450Mw, a quantity that is typical of a town with over 100,000 residents. We have talked about it in recent weeks with this news, which highlights the continuous blackouts in the supply of electricity that could depend on the miners but also be linked to more complex infrastructural problems.

In addition to this, there is a more general problem that gaming enthusiasts know well: these farms are based on the latest generation GPUs, purchased for these facilities and therefore not available on the market for gamers. The few cards left are offered at prices well above the official list, making it even more difficult for enthusiasts to update their system to the latest technologies from NVIDIA and AMD.

A story that repeats itself then, having already encountered these dynamics in recent years with the difficulty of users to get their hands on the latest video cards or in any case to be able to pay them what the official price lists are.