On the morning of December 3, according to CityNews, a cryptocurrency mining server farm in Chiang Mai, Thailand, caught fire. The resulting fire is said to have cost the three-story building around $60,000 (2 million baht) in damage. However, Mae Ping Police stated that no one was inside the building at the time of the incident, so the incident should result in only financial hardships.
The fire destroyed 72 servers, but it’s unclear whether that number includes all of the servers in the building or just the ones that were damaged by the flames. Authorities “believed the office was mining cryptocurrencies,” according to the main takeaway.
The report doesn’t say what kind of server farm equipment was used or what cryptocurrency was mined. Crypto mining, on the other hand, is almost always a power-hungry process, so the specifics are probably irrelevant. However, enthusiasts who have been unable to purchase new graphics cards at retail prices are likely to scoff at the situation. Miners have unfortunately added to the ongoing GPU shortage by buying anything they can get their hands on to make a quick buck.
In the best-case scenario, the server farm would use dedicated mining rigs rather than consumer GPUs. On the other hand, a pessimist might wonder how anyone could allow such tragedy to strike the best gaming graphics cards, which are already scarce.
According to images published by CityNews, the hardware will not be salvageable in any case. Those PC gamers who have a natural proclivity for schadenfreude may take comfort in the fact that the equipment is no longer usable.
Even if the servers weren’t being used to mine cryptocurrency, the incident emphasizes the importance of ensuring that all of the systems are operated safely, particularly in terms of operating temperatures and power supplies.
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