Mining Container
A mining container is a ready farm inside a shipping container: racks, ventilation, and panels already installed. All that remains is to bring power and internet.
What a mining container is
The base is a standard shipping container, usually 40 feet, sometimes 20. Inside are racks for two or three hundred air-cooled ASICs, a ventilation wall with filters, distribution panels, lighting, and sensors. In essence it is a data center squeezed into a truck body.
The point of a container is speed and mobility. Building a room for a farm takes months of permits and construction, a container lands on a site in days. And when the site's power rate goes bad or the flare gas well runs dry, the farm leaves in one piece instead of being sold off.
Site requirements do not go anywhere, though: a container with three hundred ASICs needs a megawatt of connected power, level ground, a fence, and internet. The container solves the building question, not the electricity question.
The main limitation is climate. An air-cooled container lives on street air: in a hot region it survives summer by throttling or gets retrofitted with misting. Hydro and immersion containers solve this, but cost noticeably more than air-cooled ones.
The short version
| Format | shipping container, usually 40 feet |
| Capacity | two or three hundred air-cooled ASICs |
| Site requirements | about a megawatt of power, level ground |
| Main advantage | days to launch, relocation in one piece |
| Main drawback | dependence on outdoor climate |
What to look at when choosing
Count the power honestly: capacity in ASICs times their watts plus ventilation. A container without power is a warehouse.
Look at the ventilation wall and the filters: cheap containers cut corners right there, and the ASICs pay with dust and heat.
Check panels and breakers by their ratings, not by photos: homemade panels show up in containers more often than anyone would like.
Plan a service zone: in a cramped container a board swap turns into yoga, and that is every single repair.
A case from practice
A site with a cheap rate turned up on the grounds of an old factory: power available, no room for rent. A container for two hundred forty ASICs stood next to the transformer within a week, commissioning included. Two years later the factory raised the rate, and the farm moved to a new site on two trucks in three days.
Related terms
Where to go next on the site
Hardware
- ASIC Miner knowledge base
- Antminer S21 tool
Numbers
Questions and answers
A container or your own building
The building wins where it already exists and the power is already connected. The container wins on launch speed and the option to leave together with the farm.
How many ASICs fit in 40 feet
Air-cooled layouts usually take two or three hundred, the exact number depends on the ASIC model and the ventilation scheme of the specific container.
Is a container suitable for home
No, it is an industrial format: a megawatt of power, the noise of the ventilation wall, and truck logistics. Home scale calls for other solutions.
How the terms connect
Every link in the chain is clickable. Orange marks where you are now.
Looking for an ASIC miner
The catalog holds 212 models. You can compare them by hashrate and by joules per terahash, then plug your own rate into the calculator and see what stays in your pocket.
Page written and checked by Denys Klimchuk. Updated .