Turning Mining Rigs into Cloud Assets

A mining machine that earns about four dollars of bitcoin a day, while its owner pays about six dollars to host it, is losing money every day it runs. Arshed Gulshan of Equalizer says almost fifteen percent of the miners in hosting centers his company surveyed across Abu Dhabi are in that position.

Gulshan spoke in a fireside chat at Mining Disrupt Miami 2026, held July 21 to 23. His company makes software that lets a hosting center split the hashrate of the machines it already runs and send each piece wherever it wants.

He explained it with ordinary cloud computing. Google Cloud and AWS buy a regular computer, install virtualization software, and lease out its processors and memory in pieces to different customers. Equalizer, he said, does the same thing for mining machines. Take a site with two S19 miners at 100 terahashes each. The pool normally shows two workers. With Equalizer, the operator sees 200 terahashes as one unit and can split it into 200 workers at one terahash each, or 50 workers at four terahashes each, without changing anything on the machines.

Gulshan was clear that this is not mainly about selling cloud contracts. He said Equalizer was built to make hosting centers more efficient, to raise their profit margins and to help them compete with AI data centers. As he put it, "with equalizer you get the complete control on the hashrate."

The feature he spent the most time on is called the virtual miner. Owners keep losing machines running for two reasons, he said. In some places they can write the electricity cost off against tax, and some customers have prepaid three or four years of hosting, so the contract says the machine stays on. With the virtual miner, the host unplugs the losing machine and buys the same hashrate from Equalizer, which he put at about four dollars for four dollars of coin. The contract is still met. The empty slot can then take a new machine, with a new installation charge and a new deposit.

On how an operator can check the numbers, Gulshan said Equalizer is not a black box. Operators can run its simulator with their own figures before signing up, and connect an API key so the data comes in automatically. He put it simply: "what you see in simulator is what you get at the end from the day one."

He was blunt about cloud mining's reputation for scams. Most cloud mining companies, he said, are really accounting companies. You pay for hashrate and give a wallet address, but you cannot choose the pool or the coin. With Equalizer, a host selling hashrate can let each buyer point it at any pool.

And on NiceHash, which already matches buyers and sellers of hashrate, Gulshan said it aggregates many machines to fill a larger order, while Equalizer splits hashrate into any amount.

The full story, with the video of the session, is on Intelligence Disrupt at intelligencedisrupt dot com, and stories like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.