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> Is the electricity subsidized enough to justify all the other headaches associates with running an operation out of there?

Yes, it is. Mining cost is overwhelmingly dictated by energy cost. And once you have a small farm running, it should be easy to scale up.

Also consider the possibility that they were stealing the power (I think I read that somewhere).

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You also have to constantly update your mining equipment, because it becomes obsolete within months.

Months is probably inaccurate mainly because new equipment is not released that often. You may need more equipment to maintain your share but not necessarily updated equipment. Further updated equipment usually helps alleviate the energy usage which in these cases is not as relevant.

The miners I've known don't usually throw everything out. They expand or maintain with new gear when appropriate, and 'expire' the oldest stuff when space gets tight.

You're right about the electricity point - replacement schedules are often dictated by power per watt, since improving that expands margins. If power is free or subsidized, hardware costs are a larger part of expenses and it becomes tempting to buy more older gear instead of less fancy stuff.

(As an aside, miners are a great place to buy computer parts for that reason - I've known several unloading last year's GPUs dirt cheap. The hardware is run into the ground, but I've seen "if it craps out call me and I'll replace it" deals.)

I cant imagine many people are still mining on GPUs, not since ASICs have become the norm and unfortunately a bitcoin mining ASIC is pretty useless outside of mining for bitcoins.

Isn't the main reason that they become 'obsolete' is because their cost to run (pretty much just electricity and per unit cost of the miners themselves) exceeds the expected pay out (their relative hash rate). So by running where electricity is much cheaper older machines that have been discarded can still make sense to run.

Really depends. CPU mining is like trying to mine a diamond with a toothpick and will only get worse. If your machine isn't above at least some threshold (unless you have a massive farm of them), you're really just wasting CPU cycles and heat.

Yeah it doesn't magically make _any_ mining technique profitable again but it does shift the math back towards slower/less efficient ASICs being viable to use instead of just being a waste of money. From the article it sounds like they're using 300 of the Antminer so they're not trying to run CPU or GPU mining not sure where it falls on the current profitability range, I'm not that deep into BTC.

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