Bitcoin industry grows in Georgia, attracts $100m investment

BitFury privatised 185,000 m2 of land in Tbilisi’s Gldani district to develop the Georgian Technology Park project, which involved a mega-data centre with up to 100 MW energy capacity.Photo by BitFury.
Agenda.ge, 24 Sep 2015 - 13:10, Tbilisi,Georgia

Georgia is developing a special technology zone to attract international technology players; soon the country will feature on the international map thanks to the construction of a new data centre by the BitFury Group.

BitFury Group, a Bitcoin Blockchain infrastructure provider and transaction processing company, is building its second data centre in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi and the first Technology Park, in which the company will invest $100 million USD.

BitFurry produced Bitcoins in Georgia; an innovative payment network using virtual money. Bitcoins are an online cash and payment system - a form of digital currency - created and held electronically.

BitFury privatised 185,000 m2 of land in Tbilisi’s Gldani district from the Georgian National Agency of State Property to develop the Georgian Technology Park project. There BitFury will build a mega-data centre with up to 100 MW energy capacity to process transactions using its latest generation 28 nm and the upcoming 16 nm ASIC chips.

The company has developed its third generation immersion cooling system to create energy-saving data centre cooling systems for high performance computing applications. To cool the systems the company needed to use a large amount of electricity, and as the price of electricity was cheap in Georgia, BitFury selected this country as a preferential place to operate.

Georgia will have three main benefits – a $100 million USD investment, to bring modern information technologies into the country and to be added to the innovative technologies world map,” said BitFury official representative in Georgia Eprem Urumashvili.

BitFurry currently has one data centre located in Gori, which was jointly developed with the Georgian Co-Investment Fund. The 20 MW data centre served bitcoin transactions with about 6,000 servers every day.

It was confidential to announce the number of bitcoins the centre issued each day however BitFurry’s profit sometimes reached $300,000 USD per, revealed Blockchain statistics.

Company representatives said the Gori data centre, which opened in July 2014, had proven to be "a major success” and as a result, they "saw further potential in continuing doing business and investing in this country”.

BitFury officials said Georgia was selected for its attractive investment climate and ease of conducting business. Low energy cost and competitive labour market also played a big part in the decision-making.

BitFury has management offices in San Francisco in the United States and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, as well as data centres in Iceland, in addition to the new site in Georgia.