Gov. Doug Burgum tours Applied Blockchain facility
JAMESTOWN, N.D. (KFGO) – State and local dignitaries along with many others who made the Applied Blockchain Inc. cryptocurrency mining project possible celebrated the completion of their facility Thursday with a ribbon cutting hosted by the Jamestown Area Chamber of Commerce.
North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum joined officials from Applied Blockchain on a tour of the facility. The tour went through one of eight of the processing sites, which house thousands of high-end computers that work 24/7 to mine cryptocurrency.
Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Emily Bivens said they’re excited to use the ribbon cutting as a welcome to the community.
“Today’s ribbon cutting ceremony is a tangible reminder of the vision and commitment that Applied Blockchain brings to our community,” Bivens said. “The Jamestown Area Chamber members, ambassadors, and young professionals are here to lift up and celebrate that vision and commitment with a ceremonial cutting of the ribbon. The cutting of this ribbon signifies a new beginning and the obstacles overcome to reach this moment.”
Gov. Burgum spoke to the company’s resilience in cutting-edge technology and bringing it to North Dakota, relating to similar experiences when he started his own tech company in the 1980’s.
“You can’t celebrate a project like this that’s on the cutting edge of innovation unless you’ve got entrepreneurs, unless you have risk-takers, unless you have people that are willing to get out and try to do things with new models in places where people might say, ‘it’ll never work,’ ‘it’s too different, too new,’” Gov. Burgum said. “Whether I’m sad to say, or happy to say, the early parts of my career and trying to build a tech company in North Dakota back in the 80s, there was a lot of naysayers.”
Burgum said high-performance data centers rely on the energy and climate of North Dakota, making it a prime location for future projects of this type.
“When we’re building these high-performance data centers, yes, bitcoin mining can be confusing to people, but we have power,” Gov. Burgum said. “We’ve got the right climate. For once, people want to come here because of our climate. You can feel the heat coming off these 10s of thousands of servers that are going here.”
Applied Blockchain CEO Wes Cummins spoke about the collaborative effort from the start of their analysis and studies in June 2021, to groundbreaking in September 2021, to the finished project today.
“I think it’s absolutely amazing what our team has done, what our contractors have done,” Cummins said. “We got everyone together. I think we just hit so many of the right people. We came to the right town. You guys have so much here that we haven’t found anywhere else, both in the state, in the county, and in the town. We just got really lucky that we made this match.”
Applied Blockchain Inc. is co-located with an Otter Tail Power Company substation 7 miles north of Jamestown. The facility will utilize 100 megawatts of capacity with the ability to scale up to 200 megawatts and three more buildings to the south of the current buildings.
The facility has 30 full-time employees.
