Dirt to Data - Ep # 12 - The paper mill that heated itself with Bitcoin miners, with Steve Wood of Keystone

Steve Wood ran 2 MW of Bitcoin miners in the basement of a closed paper mill and piped their heat into a 600,000 square foot building. The mill stopped buying 200,000 gallons of propane a winter. Now he’s building AI data centers on the same idea.
Eric Sonner and Lance Teel talk with the Idaho farm kid turned Keystone founder about auditing at Coopers & Lybrand, 13 years building plants for Pyrotek, and the 2016 Bitcoin pitch his paper mill turned down. Then they get into industrial symbiosis. Liquid cooling captures about 75 percent of a data center’s heat today, so a 100 MW site has roughly 70 MW to give to greenhouses, fish hatcheries or a town pool. Steve explains why you ask the community what it wants before you build, and what he’s planning on 200 MW at Gigawatt Land with Gordon Baier.
Plus karaoke in Japan, career advice for the next generation of builders, and Steve’s charity pick, Tip of the Spear.