Digital Shovel's Case Against the Shipping Container

Scot Johnson, the founder of Digital Shovel, gave a short keynote at Mining Disrupt Miami in July 2023 with a deliberately provocative title: Bitcoin mining shipping containers are dead. He was not knocking the method from the outside. Digital Shovel started by cutting 40-foot shipping containers apart with die grinders and building racks inside them. Johnson began mining in 2016 with GPUs in a couple of rooms in his house, built a couple of containers for himself, and by 2018 other people were asking him to build them too. By the time of this talk the company had 75 full-time staff and an 85,000 square foot factory doing its own fabrication, robotic welding and circuit board assembly.

His argument against the container is simple. When you design around a container, you are not designing the most optimal data center. You are building inside a fixed envelope. His example was a natural gas well that flows at one rate today and produces less six months later. In his words, "if you put a conventional container there you can't just take a part of that container and go and put it somewhere else." The same mismatch applies to generators and transformers: if the container does not pair exactly with the generator, one of the two is wasted.

Digital Shovel's answer is a custom pod rated at 300 kilowatts. Several pods connect on a common overhead electrical busway and scale up to three megawatts with the company's switchgear. If a well is producing less, one pod can be moved to another site. The pod fits inside a 40-foot container with half an inch to spare on each side, and on site it can be lifted with a five thousand pound forklift, so there is no rigging crew, no crane, and no paying for wait time when the crane and the truck arrive at different hours.

The newest version comes apart. It ships as a flat pack or a bolt-together unit, which means it can go by air, something a full container cannot do. Johnson said he can fit 3.3 megawatts worth of pods into the space of one regular 40-foot container. In his words, "it takes three guys approximately three hours to put one pod together," and the shipping and logistics saving is about 70 percent. He also showed a nanopod for smaller miners at 120 kilowatts and under, running on single-phase power and shipping flat as well.

The full story is on Intelligence Disrupt at intelligencedisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.