$2.4M Texas home listing boasts built-in 5,786 sq ft data center | Hacker News Reader

$2.4M Texas home listing boasts built-in 5,786 sq ft data center

tomshardware.com

55 pointsdangle117 comments

As Texas houses go on average, that's expensive compared to the average of about $350k. In terms of Austin houses, that's cheap given there are $3M-$10M homes in the Bull Creek area.

I'm putting a single rack mini DC in a backyard shed by adding a high SEER mini-split, massloaded vinyl, and a dedicated outward-swinging door. The trick is not going over 200 sq ft in most of Texas because that requires a permit in most areas.

The thing with Texas though is high property taxes, where the costs for a $2.4M home could be more than $40k/year. SB2 does somewhat protect the elderly and disabled, but no one else, and still, the rates can be very high for them too.

PS: It's a pretty fucking sweet DC that uses EF's SLICTanks quieter mineral oil cooling. They're a niche HPC shop that found new life in BTC mining, apparently.

Its a bit shocking that this was listed for less than $1M in 2019 (https://images1.loopnet.com/d2/2Vrc0SwjmdZElIikDsbDegOdsX10L...) .

In less than 5 years, price has more than doubled or roughly 25% each year.

Apparently this was an AT&T data center.

If they financed $1M @3%, they're printing about 5% a year (negative 5% real interest). That's 1.5M free money in 30 years. So really they're just asking you to buy out their opportunity cost of the feds free wealth redistribution from property non-owners to owners circa COVID.

Sort of like the water pumping station in Raleigh, NC:

https://www.wunc.org/science-technology/2014-01-15/video-wha...

I would sell all tech inside and use the money to at least start a renovation and sell it as a fixer uppper. Whos gonna buy this?

Of course it had to be for Bitcoin mining...

What made Texas attractive to crypto mining? Maybe the heyday is over but why Texas?

Texas has a disconnected power grid with a floating price model and a lot of cheap power from renewables. So my understanding is that electrical prices can, at least for parts of the day, dip much lower there than anywhere else in the country.

Looks like a wicked man cave. Not so sure about living there though

And here I thought Houston was the city with no zoning laws

It is.

unclear why they couldn't have just done what normal people do and rented datacenter/warehouse space

This was clearly a shadow operation. There’s lots of them in Texas that are unregistered.

Source: https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/texas-lawmakers...

There are also a lot of Telcos building these sorts of buildings. Actually, having seen a video on this exact house[1], I'm pretty sure I've seen it before, too. "Built in the 90s by at+t" says the video.

[1] https://youtu.be/p1tjyleNCbs

lol “shadow operation” what? This house was built before cryptocurrency was even a thing. It’s an old AT&T switching hub that was disguised as a house so as to not make it an eyesore in the middle of a neighborhood.

There may have been a national security aspect to making it look like a normal house, bunkers have been disguised in a similar way [1] elsewhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROTOR

Excessive paranoia? The photos and pictures indicate it was a crypto mining facility.

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