Tommy Li opened his Mining Disrupt Miami 2022 session, held July 26–28, 2022, with a quick primer on what miners do and why it matters. Mining computers race to solve the next block and win the block reward, then 6.25 bitcoin. For a miner, he said, it is a way to acquire bitcoin below market rates, and the work itself secures the network's transactions. Li introduced himself as head of business development at Acrohash, a self-mining, hosting and cloud mining provider, and used the eight-minute slot to walk through the company's first Texas site and its expansion plans.
He set the scene with the state of the market that summer. The bear market and higher energy prices tied to the Russia-Ukraine war had pushed a share of the network's machines offline.
we've seen a decrease of around 30 percent of the bitcoin network's hash rates since its peak in june
Tommy Li · 0:50
Li's diagnosis was that mining had become "increasingly consolidated and exclusive." An average user faces three barriers: the energy rate, the maintenance cost, and the expertise needed to keep miners at peak hashrate and longevity. As a result, he argued, most people's only on-ramp to bitcoin is an exchange where they trade fiat for it. Acrohash's pitch was to take those barriers on itself and sell access to the hashrate.
He described the team behind the plan. The co-founder and CEO comes from real estate development and is an angel investor in technology, software and pharmaceutical companies. The director of engineering holds a Stanford PhD, came from the oil and gas industry, has led high-voltage projects, and has experience in high-performance computing. Li himself studied economics at UCSB and worked in wealth management before joining. The company, he said, had operated mining facilities in Asia and had seen fast power acquisition as a result of knowing local energy markets.
Why Austin
The company's first site is in Austin, Texas. Li said it was chosen for its economical locational marginal pricing and its proximity to multiple high-voltage transmission lines. It sits a fair distance from residential housing, which he presented as a way to keep disruption to local communities to a minimum, and he expected the build to create jobs across several skill levels.
He framed the site as a participant in the Texas grid, not only a load on it. Acrohash would use leading providers to join demand response and curtailment programs. During periods of high demand, he said, the Austin facility can immediately shut down and return up to 160 megawatts to the grid, with the aim of keeping disruption to residential users minimal.
Phase one and phase two
Phase one is 100 megawatts on a 10-acre site, with a permanent high-voltage substation built next to the mining facility. It consists of three 20-megawatt air-cooled buildings and one 40-megawatt immersion cooling building. Phase two adds another 20-megawatt air building and another 40-megawatt immersion building, taking the site to 160 megawatts, which Li said was slated for around the first quarter of 2023. The company was also in talks with its utility for a further 40-megawatt immersion building, which would bring the site to 200 megawatts.
The air buildings cool ASICs with evaporative media, a design Li said the team carried over from its earlier operations. He described them as permanent buildings that give strong evaporative cooling performance and are easy to maintain.
Immersion and overclocking
The immersion buildings were still in development. Li's case for them was that full coverage of the ASIC board in the cooling liquid eliminates hot spots and dead zones, runs the miners cooler, removes noise and cuts maintenance. Lower temperatures leave headroom for overclocking, and he said the early results were promising.
We've seen increases in hashrate of up to 30 or more
Tommy Li · 4:56
On operations, the Austin site was planned with an on-site repair and inventory depot so that a machine that goes offline can be fixed and brought back without shipping it out. Security would combine continuous monitoring by on-site and off-site staff with 24/7 guards on site.
Hosting, buy-to-host and fractional cloud mining
Li listed three ways to work with the company. The first is premium hosting, with competitive energy rates and maintenance fees. The second is a buy-to-host pipeline: through its relationships with ASIC makers and electrical equipment suppliers, Acrohash said it could buy the latest machines at wholesale prices and put them straight to work in Austin. The third, still in development, is cloud mining.
we will be able to fractionalize bitcoin miners and be able to provide them to individual users
Tommy Li · 6:13
The idea, as he put it, was to let individual users acquire bitcoin below market rates without buying, housing or maintaining a whole machine.
The road to one gigawatt
The roadmap Li presented was ambitious. Phase one in Austin was slated to finish in the fourth quarter of 2022, with a 60-megawatt phase two by the first quarter of 2023. In parallel, the company was developing a 70-megawatt facility in Oklahoma due online in the first quarter of 2023. It was in talks with ANDE, Paraguay's state power company, for 100 megawatts of carbon-neutral hydropower, with its Austin utility for 400 more megawatts at the same site, and on a separate Texas location with more than 400 megawatts available. The stated goal was to pass one gigawatt by the first quarter of 2024.
He closed on the theme he had opened with: lowering the barriers so that anyone can take part in mining, in keeping with the network's original design.
we have a long-term vision of decentralization and democratization of hashrate
Tommy Li · 7:04
These were plans and targets as presented on stage in July 2022, not results; the session did not report on progress against them. Acrohash invited attendees to booth 253. When this session was recorded, Bitcoin traded at $22,964; on October 12, 2026 it was $83,316.