Brian Venturo and a couple of fellow hedge fund buddies bought their first GPUs as part of an elaborate joke. It was late 2016, and for the fun of playing with something volatile that could be either trash or treasure, they had been staking their pool and fantasy football games with bitcoin instead of cash. When bitcoin prices surged, Venturo says, the group realized, 'Maybe we should take this seriously.' The friends rush-ordered GPUs, also known as graphics chips, for same-day delivery from Amazon to start mining bitcoin while their enthusiasm ran hot. The powerful processors are prized for their ability to crunch the math of crypto-mining at high speeds. Over time, the hobby turned into a business called Atlantic Crypto, which filled a garage and later warehouses with GPUs. Some of the beefy chips were rented out via the cloud to armchair cryptocurrency miners. As coin prices climbed, time was money, so the company's technicians grew skilled at speedily installing GPUs and...
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