Scot Johnson opened his talk at Mining Disrupt Miami with a blunt title: Bitcoin mining shipping containers are dead. His company, Digital Shovel, got its start cutting conventional 40-foot containers apart and building racks inside them, so the claim was not a dismissal of the people still doing that. It was an argument that the container forces a miner to design inside a fixed envelope instead of designing the best data center for the site, and that there is now a better way.
This keynote, delivered by Scot Johnson, Founder and CEO of Digital Shovel, was recorded at Mining Disrupt Miami on July 25–27, 2023. At the time of the recording, Bitcoin was trading at $29,125. As of October 11, 2026, the price stands at $82,952. The hardware question Johnson raised is the same either way: how to match a fixed-size box to a power source that does not stay fixed.
From GPU Mining at Home to an 85,000 Square Foot Factory
Johnson started mining in 2016 with GPUs in a couple of rooms in his house. He built a couple of shipping containers for himself, and by 2018 other people were asking him to build containers for them. That became Digital Shovel. At the time of the talk the company had 75 full-time staff and an 85,000 square foot manufacturing facility, with everything done in-house. Johnson listed the equipment: a laser, a punch press and turret line, an automated folding line, three brake presses and robotic welding systems. Manual welding is still done, but the company uses fully automated load and unload welding cells to build its M300 and I300 lines. For its smart PDUs it had just added a surface mount line plus through-hole capability, so it can assemble its own circuit boards, which Johnson said cut lead times considerably.
He also showed where it started: his first shop was outdoors, using die grinders to cut shipping containers apart and build racks. He told the audience that many of them would know that process. It worked, and it was all the company had at the time, but it was built around a constraint rather than a goal.
Why the 40-Foot Box Fails the Gas Well Test
Johnson's core complaint is that when you design around a container, you are not designing the most efficient data center. You are building within an envelope, and that brings constraints. When Digital Shovel began, it had no other option because it could not build its own enclosures. His first example was gas production. A natural gas well may flow at a certain rate today and produce less six months later. A conventional container cannot be split: you cannot take part of it and move it to another site.
if you put a conventional container there you can't just take a part of that container and go and put it somewhere else
Scot Johnson · 2:09
The same problem applies to generators and transformers. With a fixed generator size, the container has to be paired to it precisely. If the two do not match, either generator capacity or container capacity sits unused. Johnson said the exact same thing applies to transformers. The waste is not a flaw in any one product; it is a consequence of the fixed container size itself.
The 300-Kilowatt Pod and Scaling to Three Megawatts
Digital Shovel's answer is a modular pod it builds from scratch. Each pod is rated at 300 kilowatts. Several pods can be strung together on a common overhead electrical busway, and with the company's switchgear unit a site can scale all the way to three megawatts. Johnson said this gives an operator room to move up or down in transformer and generator size. If a well is producing less than it did, one pod can be picked up and moved to another site, so the operator is not left with underutilized equipment or underutilized power generation.
where we've got completely custom made pods they're 300 kilowatts each and I can take multiple of them and string them together using a common overhead electrical busway
Scot Johnson · 2:40
The pod's dimensions look arbitrary, Johnson admitted, but they were chosen on purpose. The goal was an efficient data center that is also easy to ship and handle. The unit fits inside a 40-foot shipping container with half an inch to spare on either side, which matters for the company's overseas customers.
Forklifts Over Cranes: Redefining Site Logistics
A full container needs a crane and a rigging crew on site, and the crane and the delivery truck do not always arrive at the same time, so the operator ends up paying wait time. The Digital Shovel pod can be lifted with a standard 5,000-pound forklift. Johnson described the sequence: the pods are dropped on the ground when the delivery comes, and when the site is ready for installation the same forklift driver picks them up and moves them into position.
it can be lifted up with a five thousand pound forklift you don't need to have an expensive rigging crew and a crane on site
Scot Johnson · 3:41
The Flat-Pack Pod: Cutting Shipping Costs by 70 Percent
The company then went a step further. Instead of shipping a fully welded unit, Digital Shovel now makes the pod come apart in pieces, so it ships as a flat pack or a bolt-together kit. Johnson pointed to the earlier speaker from Crypto Logistics, who had said you cannot really ship a container by air. This unit, he said, you can. In flat-pack form he can fit 3.3 megawatts worth of pods into the same space as a regular 40-foot shipping container.
it takes three guys approximately three hours to put one pod together you're saving 70 on your shipping and Logistics cost
Scot Johnson · 4:25
Assembly takes three people about three hours per pod. Johnson put the shipping and logistics saving at 70 percent, and added that the customer's local labor is likely cheaper than having Digital Shovel assemble the pods in its own factory, a saving the company passes on. The flat-pack approach is also what makes air freight possible at all.
Johnson closed by pointing to a second product on the booth: a new nanopod for smaller miners at 120 kilowatts and below. It runs on single-phase power, takes two skid spaces, and also ships as a flat pack. His invitation to the room was simple: come to the booth, look at the pods, and ask questions.