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Henry Quan on the Sum of Parts
Foundry Digital's Henry Quan argues that small gains in power supplies, wiring, tuning and immersion design add up, and that cooling must be bought on science.
Every gain in Bitcoin mining used to come from buying the next machine. Henry Quan says that era is over. At Mining Disrupt Miami 2024, held June 24 through 26, 2024, Quan, then vice president of mining equipment at Foundry Digital, told miners that the next profits will come from many small improvements added together. He calls it the sum of parts.
Quan spent 30 years in semiconductors, including senior roles at AMD and ATI. He told the room that efficiency gains have shrunk from tenfold with the S9 eight years ago to just 20 percent with the S21, while new machines cost more. In his words, "New and more doesn't work as well as it used to." Rising rig prices, network hashrate and the halving had pushed payback on new machines to about two years, he said.
His answer starts with the rig. A miner built on older 7 nanometer chips can match the 22 joules per terahash of the newer S19 XP because it uses three times as many chips, each at lower power. That, he said, means lower cost and better tuning. He added that an S19 XP run at k Pro settings gives 20 percent more hashrate at the same efficiency.
Then come the parts around the rig: high efficiency power supplies, three phase power or 240 volt single phase power instead of step down transformers, and airflow modelled with computational fluid dynamics. On an S21, he said, a better power supply alone saves about 100 watts, or 44 dollars a year. Together, those changes came to about 55,000 dollars a year for one megawatt.
Quan saved his sharpest words for immersion cooling. He compared many tanks to Howard Hughes and the Spruce Goose, a plane built on intuition that never flew. "Hey, Howard, intuition isn't good enough," he said. Buyers, he said, should ask vendors for their fluid dynamics models and measure the temperature difference between inlet and outlet. A well designed tank shows 15 to 20 degrees, against 5 to 10 for an average one. He also said many operators install miners backwards so they can see the lights, which works against the flow.
Add it all up, Quan said, and a megawatt of immersed miners earns over 260,000 dollars more a year, enough to pay for the extra hardware and bring payback to 1.6 years. The talk closed with Foundry's own products, including an orientation kit for immersion, a 4,000 watt power supply and a control board with Foundry firmware and no dev fee.
When this session was recorded, Bitcoin traded at 61,272 dollars. On October 17, 2026, it was 81,444 dollars.
The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.