Justin Podhola, chief executive of Elite Mining, opened his keynote at Mining Disrupt Miami 2021, held July 20–21, 2021, with the story of how the company started. In 2016 and 2017 he went to a series of meetings with electric utilities in eastern Washington, the public utility districts the state calls PUDs. What he took away from those meetings was that an operator could not assume local support for mining.
The host introduced the session by noting that the University of Cambridge estimates Bitcoin miners worldwide use more electricity than Sweden or Malaysia. Podhola's talk was about the practical side of that scrutiny: where a miner can put its machines, and how quickly it can leave.
in that time frame i learned really quickly that not everyone agreed with mining
Justin Podhola · 2:03
He said the lesson matters because the industry keeps growing and many of the people it deals with are only beginning to understand what mining is. Until mining is broadly accepted, he argued, the type of energy behind a site matters less than whether the site can keep running. He said he did not care whether the power was solar or any other kind.
you're able to run your operations without risk of getting shut down that's what matters the most
Justin Podhola · 2:28
From a team of three to a mobile product
That conclusion, as he told it, is what led him and a core team of three people to choose a mobile design. By the time of the talk the company had grown to 50 team members. The harder question was how to build a mobile unit around immersion cooling, and around single-phase immersion in particular, which he said is difficult both to execute and to improve on.
Podhola described two and a half years of development, much of it, in his words, well underfunded, and a long period in stealth mode. He said the quiet was deliberate, because the team failed many times before the design worked. Elite Mining vertically integrated along the way: it opened a subsidiary he called EMU, with a research and development department that works on immersion technology every day.
He claimed the result was one of the most efficient units on the market. He did not present test data on stage to support that claim, so it stands as the company's own description of its product.
Trailers, not containers
The design choices he listed were aimed at making the units simple to place and simple to move. Rather than buying dry coolers or other standard cooling equipment, the team built its own cooling systems from the ground up. The enclosure is not a shipping container.
we don't use containers what we use is enclosed cargo trailers
Justin Podhola · 4:13
He compared them to the trailers construction companies tow behind their trucks. One advantage he gave was that moving them does not require a driver with a commercial driver's license, or CDL. The units also need no foundation and no pad.
The case against concrete
Podhola tied the no-foundation design to emissions. Leaving out the concrete pad, he said, reduces a site's carbon emissions significantly, a point he felt most people overlook.
concrete is one of the worst offenders of carbon emissions
Justin Podhola · 4:46
He also described the product as geothermal in nature. According to Podhola, the system makes use of the cooler temperature of the ground, which he put at roughly 55 to 60 degrees depending on location, to help keep the units cool. He was running short of time and did not explain the mechanism in more detail.
Mobility and the power contract
The commercial case for mobility rests on power purchase agreements. Podhola said five to ten years is about the industry average for a PPA, and acknowledged that longer terms are available. When an agreement runs out, or a better opportunity appears somewhere else, he said a mobile operator can move its immersion units from site to site without paying to pick up an entire facility and rebuild it elsewhere.
He said this ability is how the company intends to change the direction of the industry, and described the team's daily commitment as putting its best foot forward and developing a good product to deliver to its customers.
Minerset, Wyoming and a hosting rate
Near the end of the talk Podhola announced a partnership with Minerset, which is named alongside Elite Mining in the session title, and thanked Elias, Jim and the Minerset team. Under the arrangement, buyers who go through minerset.com would receive a discount on Elite Mining's products.
He was open about scale. He said he was not asking anyone in the room to buy 100 megawatts of product, because the company could not supply that much.
there's no way our manufacturing capacity could actually do that but we're expanding
Justin Podhola · 8:08
The expansion he described was a move to Wyoming. Podhola said the company's headquarters was relocating there from Washington because of a better political climate, and said Senator Lummis had been supportive. EMU and EMI each had a booth at the event.
His last announcement was a hosting offer: an all-in cost of 3.97, which he called the best in North America. He did not state the unit on stage. He said the company passes its electricity costs through to clients and wants them to keep operating through a bear market as well as a bull market.
Bitcoin then and now
Bitcoin traded at about $32,125 on July 20, 2021, the first day of the Miami event. On October 15, 2026 it was $80,885. The session is more than five years old, and the company details in this story, including team size, headquarters and hosting price, are as Podhola gave them in July 2021. They have not been checked against Elite Mining's current operations.
The full session runs just under ten minutes and is linked below.