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Bethany Dentler, executive director of Medina County Economic Development Corp., learned of these plans and launched Holmes on building the 150-mile fiber network that has been live for about seven years. Due to the huge amount of bandwidth required for the encryption operation, that company simply could not exist in this region without the fiber network.
"They are using tools we have put in place to be at the forefront of some of these technologies out there," Dentler said.
David Corrado, CEO of the Medina County Fiber Network, described the fiber system essentially as the railway, and LightSpeed data centers are railway stations along the track.
With the Ethode headquarters off of Medina Road, where there is also a small data center (the Medina facility costs around $ 500,000 to start up), the company has invested around $ 400,000 to prepare 30,000 square feet of space in Valley City, 5656 Innovation Drive, which would be used exclusively for cryptographic extraction in LightSpeed. The project started around September 2015, with LightSpeed officially opening the business in May 2017.
The operation of Valley City is entirely dedicated to mining encryption. But the other space is used for more traditional services like the provision of internet fiber, cloud server and desktop virtualization.
With virtually no marketing activity, the word has spread in the technology sector of the data center's ability to encrypt mining, and customers around the world have lined up to ship in their equipment.
The Valley City space, which is being continually built, was consuming so much power from the start that there were three interruptions in the first month. What the structure could handle was, apparently, questionable.
"FirstEnergy almost overturned when we connected and we started using electricity so quickly," said Holmes.
He said it was said that there were six megawatts available at the facility, but they eventually had more than two that the substation could handle.
"Of those two megawatts, everything is allocated," said Holmes. "I could fill a 100 megawatt data center tomorrow if it were ready, I have more people who want to be here than I could ever serve."
Holmes, who is originally from the region, has decided to build that operation in Medina not only for its ties to the area, but because, in practice, it is quite cheap.
Holmes declined to say what is the current rate for hosting a customer's facility.
But power is actually cheaper in Ohio than other markets. According to a 2018 report by WalletHub, Ohio is the thirty-second most expensive for energy between the 50 states and Washington, D.C.
And the inherently colder climate, compared to coastal regions such as California, where technology companies tend to regroup, already save on some of the costs of cooling down their servers.
These combined features are what has contributed to making LightSpeed, with its focus on encryption, such a rapidly growing business.
Even with the price of the scrambles coming down from their frantic peak – Bitcoin has risen to nearly $ 20,000 by the end of 2017 and today is estimated at close to $ 6,300 – there are still many hungry miners. And LightSpeed provides a structure for miners that probably can not replicate. They also offer the legitimacy that comes with the support of a consolidated business software.
