Mining Farm
A mining farm is a site with several ASICs running at once, with its own power feed, planned airflow and remote management.
What a mining farm is
There is no formal threshold: people call ten asics in a rented unit a farm, and they call a megawatt container a farm too. The real line runs where household logic stops working. One ASIC you put in the garage and forget about. With five, questions show up that were never there before: is the feed big enough, where does the heat go, who reboots an asic while you are away.
The first thing everyone runs into is electricity. An Antminer S21 draws 3500 W, so five miners are already 17.5 kW. A single phase feed in Spain carries 14.49 kW at most, which means the fifth one does not fit physically and you need three phase power. One phase behind a 32 A breaker holds about 7.4 kW, which is two miners and no room for a third.
The second thing is air. Five asics dump the same 17.5 kW back out as heat, and that is the power of a dozen household heaters. A room with no airflow through it warms up within an hour, and after that they start pushing hot air in a circle, drop their frequency and mine less. A layout with a cold side and a hot side solves this better than any air conditioner, because the air conditioner itself eats a quarter to a third of the power it removes.
The third thing is management. On one asic you notice a problem from the power bill, on ten from the pool report. A working farm means readable worker names, pool alerts when a worker goes quiet, a PDU that can power cycle single outlets and spare power supplies on the shelf. Without that, one dead miner sits unnoticed for a week.
Quick reference table
| What it is | a site for several asics with its own feed |
| Five S21 asics | 17.5 kW and the same again as heat |
| Single phase feed | up to 14.49 kW, past that only three phases |
| 32 A phase | about 7.4 kW, which is two asics |
| What is mandatory | airflow, a PDU, pool alerts, a spare PSU |
Where to start the math
Count backward from electricity, not forward from the number of asics. Find out what feed the room has and what tariff you will be given, divide the available kilowatts by the model's draw and you get your ceiling on asics. The reverse order ends with bought hardware and nowhere to plug it in.
Then noise. An air cooled asic puts out about 75 decibels, and ten of them side by side reach a level where people stop talking in the room. Residential areas rule that out almost every time, so farms move to industrial zones or switch to hydro and immersion, where the noise stays outside at the dry cooler.
And the tariff decides more than everything else together. On the Spanish household rate of about €0.135 per kilowatt hour most asics run at a loss, and a farm simply multiplies that loss by the number of asics. A farm makes sense only where you have negotiated an industrial price or you have your own generation.
Sample calculation
A room with a three phase feed and 32 A breakers per phase gives about 22 kW in total. Six S21 asics at 3500 W each come to 21 kW, so they fit with a small margin, two per phase. The heat is the same 21 kW, which calls for extraction sized for that flow rather than a household fan. At a rate of €0.135 the power bill lands around 2040 euros a month, and that is the figure you want in hand before you buy hardware.
Related terms
Where to go next on the site
Hardware
- Antminer S21 tool
- WhatsMiner M66 tool
Numbers
Guides
- ASIC Miner knowledge base
Questions and answers
How many asics can you run at home
One on the electrical side, sometimes two: a single phase feed in Spain carries up to 14.49 kW for the whole house, and household power steps start at 3.45 kW. On noise, an air cooled asic in a living room is impossible, and the question usually gets settled by decibels rather than watts.
Does a farm need an air conditioner
Usually no. An air conditioner adds a quarter to a third of the heat it removes onto your bill, while extraction with a cool air intake does the job. An air conditioner earns its place where the outside air is hot itself for most of the year.
At what count does a farm beat a single asic
The money comes from the tariff and the upkeep, not from the count. Ten asics on expensive power lose more than one asic on cheap power. Economies of scale show up in shared spare parts, one technician and one energy contract.
What comes first, asics or infrastructure
Infrastructure. The feed, the breakers, the PDU and the extraction do not travel with the asics, and bought hardware sitting idle costs money every day.
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 .