The Compute Competition

At $0.08/kWh, an Antminer Z15 Pro mining Zcash earns about $770 of revenue per megawatt-hour. The best Bitcoin ASICs earn about $135. A rented H100 earns about $1,680, if it stays busy. Three kinds of compute now compete for the same power, and the winner depends on the denominator. TLDR Per megawatt-hour, Zcash wins against Bitcoin by 6x to 8x. The Z15 Pro earns ~$773/MWh at today's ZEC price; the most efficient Bitcoin fleet earns ~$135 on Hashrate Index's Energy Hashprice. Against AI compute, it loses on energy and wins on capital. An H100 at the OCPI settlement earns ~$1,679/MWh when fully rented, but a megawatt of Z15 Pros costs $3-6M of hardware against $18-23M of new H100s, before the data center. Utilization is the swing factor.

First reported by Hashrate Index. This page is a short excerpt; the full text is theirs.