The company
A mining farm in East Wenatchee, Washington, rebuilt into a compute plant, run by the people who rebuilt it.
Masterchain Corporation owns and operates its own computing plant on the Columbia River in East Wenatchee, Washington. The plant was built in 2018 to mine Ethereum. When that trade ended it stood cold for the better part of two years. We spent 2025 converting it, and it now runs document, image and video work for our own products and for customers who bring us their jobs.
What is on the floor
One hundred and sixty machines are in service, carrying nine hundred and sixty AMD RX 580 graphics cards, six to a machine. The hosts themselves are modest: a low-end processor and eight gigabytes of memory, which is all that is needed to keep six cards fed. Power comes off the river at seven and a half cents the kilowatt hour.
The cards cost about eighty dollars for eight gigabytes of memory. The current generation of datacentre part costs about three hundred and sixty-five dollars for one gigabyte. That ratio is the whole reason this company exists, and it only holds for work that can be cut into many small independent pieces.
What we take on
We are suited to jobs that divide:
- Long documents, in quantity, read page by page.
- Large batches of images.
- Video measured in minutes rather than in seconds.
We are not suited to jobs that need one very large model to answer one question very quickly. A card from 2017 will lose that contest. We do not pretend otherwise, and we will say so before taking the work.
How we build
Every part of the stack that touches the cards is built from source, because nothing shipped supports hardware of this age. When a tool is wrong about the hardware, we fix the tool. Measurements are taken on the plant, in the conditions the job will actually run in, and a change that cannot be measured is not a change we ship.
The record
- 2018 — the farm is built and begins mining.
- 2022 — Ethereum moves to proof of stake; the farm stops.
- 2025 — conversion to visual language work; the fleet comes back online.
- 2026 — document, image and video systems in service.