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Bitcoin miner Zack Pettit skating on his work break at the SCATE Ventures mining facility in Dallesport, Washington.
SCATE Ventures Inc.

Nick Sears was 17 years old when he helped build a bitcoin mining farm in Dallesport, Washington. He was 18 when he was legally allowed to buy bitcoin for the first time. And now, at 19, Sears has doubled down on his life as a bitcoin miner, saying “no” to college and “yes” to living in a room inside a data center that houses 4,500 whirling ASICs. 

“My room is sound-locked,” said Sears of the acoustic retrofitting of his living quarters. “So I can’t hear the machines when I close my door, but they are definitely noisy if I have my door open.”

The machines generate about 80 decibels of noise apiece — but Sears says he likes being as close to the action as possible. It also beats making the half hour commute each way from his parents’ house in White Salmon. 

The 19 year-old has spent pretty much every single day for the last two years teaching himself the nuances of how mining machines work – and crucially, how to fix them. He believes his education in soldering and electronics is worth a whole lot more to him than a university degree. 

“I don’t think about going to college at all, just pursuing further knowledge in the repairs of the miners,” continued Sears.

CNBC spoke with multiple miners for this story. Many explained that the allure of mining comes from being able to tangibly grasp the power of bitcoin. 

“If you’ve been to any of these data centers, the first thing you’ll notice is just how vast and how impressive they are. They’re huge,” said explained Thomas Heller, chief business officer for Compass Mining, which works with Sears’ employer, SCATE Ventures. 

“There’s so much noise, and there’s so much heat. There’s just so much action going on. It is quite cool to walk into a data center for  the first time that’s mining bitcoin, because you can really connect the intangible aspects of bitcoin as a currency, with the physical nature of these machines consuming power and doing these calculations.” 

Bitcoin miner Nick Sears lives on-site at the SCATE Ventures mining farm in Dallesport, Washington.
SCATE Ventures Inc.

A day in the life of a miner

Mining for bitcoin isn’t a glamorous job.

“When we first got here, we were setting up racks, creating the network infrastructure for the internet, and we essentially had to wire everything,” he said. 

Once the physical infrastructure was up and running, Sears got into more of a rhythm. He’s now up at 7 A.M. everyday and works from eight to four. He remains on site afterwards, just in case of an emergency, and there is a technician who works night shifts so that Sears can get some sleep.

But beyond the hours, there is no typical work day for Sears. 

“That’s the cool thing about this job – I don’t have a set routine that I do everyday,” he said. “Every morning, I find what needs to be fixed.” 

Some days, that means Sears repairs walls and other physical infrastructure. “If we have to repair a camera, maybe I’m fixing a cable.”

But the biggest part of the job is monitoring and managing every one of those 4,500 Bitmain and Whatsminer ASICs to ensure they are running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If even one of those machines goes offline, or is only running at partial capacity, the SCATE Ventures mine loses money.

That’s because when someone is mining for bitcoin, what they are actually doing is lending their computing power to the bitcoin network. The more machines you have online, the better your chances at winning bitcoin.

Rig under inspection at the SCATE Ventures mining farm in Dallesport, Washington.
SCATE Ventures Inc.

Roughly every ten minutes, 6.25 bitcoins are created. In order to mint these new tokens, a global pool of miners are all contributing their computing power to running a hashing algorithm. But these miners aren’t working in a vacuum. They’re competing against each other to see who can unlock each batch of new bitcoin first. 

So the stakes are high for Sears. Being diligent and knowing how to triage issues across the entire facility is critical to success.

Some mining sites use more sophisticated software to monitor the machines, which includes checking the temperature of each hashboard within the individual miners. 

But most important for Sears is just figuring out which of his machines aren’t functioning at full capacity. 

“Every day, you find the machines that have stopped hashing, then you remove them from the rack, and you troubleshoot,” he explained. “You’ve got to find the problem with the machines. You’ve got to find out why it went offline.”

It could be a power outage, which would affect all the machines, or it could be a network outage which could impact all of the machines or just some. 

“Sometimes they just need a power cycle or a reboot,” he said.

But the hardware fix isn’t always as simple as that. 

“It could be that the fan on the individual machine that is used for cooling is broken, or maybe it’s the power supply that needs to be repaired or replaced,” explained Heller.

“It could be the hashboards themselves,” continued Heller. “Each hashboard has lots of individual chips, and those are the chips doing the calculations. I think with a Bitmain machine, if more than four chips on a single hashboard are broken, the whole hashboard will switch off. So instead of hashing at about 100%, you’re only hashing at two-thirds or one-third.” 

Seasonal changes in the weather add a whole other layer of complexity. 

Lead technician Nick Sears repairs hardware at the SCATE Ventures Inc. mining farm in Dallesport, Washington.
SCATE Ventures Inc.

Storms can lead to power outages or other disruptions. Heller says that in the summer, the machines can also overheat, especially at the farms which have upgraded to using more powerful units over the course of the last two years. 

SCATE’s mine in Washington seems to have found a way around this problem by using its own immersion cooling technology, which involves submerging bitcoin miners in a non-conductive fluid to dissipate heat, rather than relying on fans. 

Training up and getting paid

Sears may not need a diploma to mine, but taking online training courses run by Chinese engineers who work for Bitmain has gone a long way toward helping him repair specialized mining equipment.

Last month, Sears and another employee completed a virtual class through Bitmain to learn how to work on the ASIC chips on hashboards, as well as the power supplies of the S17s, one of the most popular machines now used to mint bitcoin. 

“I have a certification of maintenance repair, so lately, I’ve just been perfecting my skills in that category,” explained Sears. “It certifies my knowledge and gives me access to buy supplies and material directly through Bitmain.”

Lead technician Nick Sears at the SCATE Ventures Inc. mining farm in Dallesport, Washington.
SCATE Ventures Inc.

Next, he hopes to attend an in-person class in Atlanta, Georgia, to learn more about soldering. “The hard part is learning how to solder and disassemble a circuit board,” said Sears.

Sears’ boss, Scott Bennett, is big on giving his team access to the resources they need to get better at their jobs. 

Bennett, CEO of SCATE Ventures, is a self-taught miner who started his business in his parents’ garage back in 2017, just before the last crypto “winter,” when prices of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies plunged. Similar to Sears, Bennett once lived at one of his data centers – only he opted for an on-site camper, rather than a room inside the facility itself. 

It helped that he lives within minutes of some of the cheapest power in the world. 

“All of our facilities are 100% hydro powered,” said Bennett. 

The mining facility where Sears works is next to the Columbia River and directly adjacent the Dalles Dam. “We love that source of power. It’s cheap, renewable, and very abundant,” he said.

As for employee pay, Sears says that he makes $54,000 a year, plus full health insurance, which is paid for by the company. 

Bennett also runs some mining machines exclusively for his employees. That amounts to about .02 BTC quarterly, which by today’s price equates to a $788 bonus every three months to Sears. 

“With all the miners in China going offline, the difficulty rate has been changing, so the rewards are higher,” said Sears. “The last time we got a little bit more than we did the previous time, which is cool by me.”

The SCATE Ventures mining farm runs on hydropower generated by the Dalles Dam.
SCATE Ventures Inc.

Mining remotely

It is also possible to become a crypto miner without physically handling any mining equipment at all.

Adam Gitzes decided in early 2021 that he really wanted to mine for bitcoin. After his wife vetoed the idea of installing equipment in their home, he began to look for alternatives.

Gitzes discovered Compass Mining, which allows customers to buy mining machines for between $5,800 and $11,700, then locates them in partner data centers and takes care of the physical logistics.

“I bought the machines on the website, Compass managed the logistics, delivering the machines to three different data centers in North America,” said Gitzes, who explained he spent 1.1 bitcoin — about $60,000 at the time of purchase — on them.

“Compass also configured them the way that I asked.”

So a typical day in the life of a miner like Gitzes consists of waking up and checking online to see how much bitcoin his machines mined overnight and to ensure that none of his units are down.

Inside the SCATE Ventures mining farm in Dallesport, Washington.
SCATE Ventures Inc.

Gitzes owns six machines that he says are on the “higher end.” When China expelled all its miners, Gitzes says it doubled the amount of money that his machines generate daily. 

After paying the mining pool fee of 1.25%, Gitzes’ miners generate about .0055 bitcoin a day, or $216 at today’s prices. Daily electricity costs are about $30, so he’s pulling in roughly $186 a day, or just shy of $5,700 every month. At that rate, he’ll recoup his investment in about 11 months, assuming no major fluctuations in energy or bitcoin prices.

Gitzes was so impressed by the Compass business model that he quit his job at Amazon to join the team in March. “The mission to decentralize mining and make it so that everyone can participate is something that I find really important,” said Gitzes.

The SCATE Ventures mining farm is in Dallesport, Washington.
SCATE Ventures Inc.

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AI is disrupting the advertising business in a big way — industry leaders explain how

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AI is disrupting the advertising business in a big way — industry leaders explain how

An AI assistant on display at Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona.

Angel Garcia | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Artificial intelligence is shaking up the advertising business and “unnerving” investors, one industry leader told CNBC.

“I think this AI disruption … unnerving investors in every industry, and it’s totally disrupting our business,” Mark Read, the outgoing CEO of British advertising group WPP, told CNBC’s Karen Tso on Tuesday.

The advertising market is under threat from emerging generative AI tools that can be used to materialize pieces of content at rapid pace. The past couple of years has seen the rise of a number of AI image generators, including OpenAI’s DALL-E, Google’s Veo and Midjourney.

In his first interview since announcing he would step down as WPP boss, Read said that AI is “going to totally revolutionize our business.”

“AI is going to make all the world’s expertise available to everybody at extremely low cost,” he said at London Tech Week. “The best lawyer, the best psychologist, the best radiologist, the best accountant, and indeed, the best advertising creatives and marketing people often will be an AI, you know, will be driven by AI.”

Read said that 50,000 WPP employees now use WPP Open, the company’s own AI-powered marketing platform.

“That, I think, is my legacy in many ways,” he added.

Outgoing WPP CEO says AI will 'revolutionize' advertising business

Structural pressure on creative parts of the ad business are driving industry consolidation, Read also noted, adding that companies would need to “embrace” the way in which AI would impact everything from creating briefs and media plans to optimizing campaigns.

A report from Forrester released in June last year showed that more than 60% of U.S. ad agencies are already making use of generative AI, with a further 31% saying they’re exploring use cases for the technology.

‘Huge transformation’

Read is not alone in this view. Advertising is undergoing a “huge transformation” due to the disruptive effects of AI, French advertising giant Publicis Groupe’s CEO Maurice Levy told CNBC at the Viva Tech conference in Paris.

He noted that AI image and video generation tools are speeding up content production drastically, while automated messaging systems can now achieve “personalization at scale like never before.”

Read more CNBC tech news

However, the Publicis chief stressed that AI should only be considered a tool that people can use to augment their lives.

“We should not believe that AI is more than a tool,” he added.

And while AI is likely to impact some jobs, Levy ultimately thinks it will create more roles than it destroys.

“Will AI replace me, and will AI kill some jobs? I think that AI, yes, will destroy some jobs,” Levy conceded. However, he added that, “more importantly, AI will transform jobs and will create more jobs. So the net balance will be probably positive.”

This, he says, would be in keeping with the labor impacts of previous technological inventions like the internet and smartphones.

AI is moving from curiosity to action, Publicis' Maurice Levy says

“There will be more autonomous work,” Levy added.

Still, Nicole Denman Greene, analyst at Gartner, warns brands should be wary of causing a negative reaction from consumers who are skeptical of AI’s impact on human creativity.

According to a Gartner survey from September, 82% of consumers said firms using generative AI should prioritize preserving human jobs, even if it means lower profits.

“Pivot from what AI can do to what it should do in advertising,” Greene told CNBC.

“What it should do is help create groundbreaking insights, unique execution to reach diverse and niche audiences, push boundaries on what ‘marketing’ is and deliver more brand differentiated, helpful and relevant personalized experiences, including deliver on the promise of hyper-personalization.”

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Nvidia-mania took over Europe this week. Here’s what I learned from Jensen Huang

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Nvidia-mania took over Europe this week. Here's what I learned from Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., left, and Emmanuel Macron, France’s president at the 2025 VivaTech conference in Paris, France, on Wednesday, June 11, 2025.

Nathan Laine | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Nvidia boss Jensen Huang has been on a tour of Europe this week, bringing excitement and intrigue to everywhere he visited.

His message was clear — Nvidia is the company that can help Europe build its artificial intelligence infrastructure so the region can take control of its own destiny with the transformative technology.

I’ve been in London and Paris this week following Huang around as he met with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron, journalists, fans, analysts and gave a keynote at Nvidia’s GTC event in the capital of France.

Here’s the what I saw and the key things I learned.

The draw of Huang is huge

Huang is truly the current rockstar of the tech world.

At London Tech Week, the lines were long and the auditorium packed to hear him speak.

The GTC event in Paris was full too. It was like going to a music concert or sporting event. There were GTC Paris T-shirts on the back of every chair and even a merchandise store.

Nvidia GTC in Paris on 11 June 2025

Arjun Kharpal

The aura of Huang really struck me when, after a question-and-answer session with him and a room full of attendees, most people lined up to take pictures or selfies with him.

Macron and Starmer both wanted to be seen on stage with him.

Nvidia positions itself as Europe’s AI hope

Nvidia’s key product is its graphics processing units (GPU) that are used to train and execute AI applications.

But Huang has positioned Nvidia as more than a chip company. During the week, he described Nvidia as an infrastructure firm. He also said AI should be seen as infrastructure like electricity.

His pitch to all countries was that Nvidia could be the company that will help countries build out that infrastructure.

“We believe that in order to compete, in order to build a meaningful ecosystem, Europe needs to come together and build capacity that is joint,” Huang said during a speech at the Viva Tech conference in Paris on Wednesday.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

One of the most significant partnerships announced this week is between French startup Mistral and Nvidia to build a so-called AI cloud using the latter’s GPUs.

Huang spoke a lot during the week about “sovereign AI” — the concept of building data centers within a country’s borders that services its population rather than relying on servers located overseas. Among European policymakers and companies, this has been an important topic.

Huang also heaped praise on the U.K., France and Europe more broadly when it came to their potential in the AI industry.

China still behind but catching up

On Thursday, Huang decided to do a tour of Nvidia’s booth and I managed to catch him to get a few words on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe.”

A key topic of that discussion was China. Nvidia has not been able to sell its most advanced chips to China because of U.S. export controls and even less sophisticated semiconductors are being blocked. In its last quarterly results, Nvidia took a $4.5 billion hit on unsold inventory.

I asked Huang about how China was progressing with AI chips, in particular referencing Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that is trying to make semiconductor products to rival Nvidia.

Huang said Huawei is a generation behind Nvidia. But because there is lots of energy in China, Huawei can just use more chips to get results.

Nvidia CEO: Huawei ‘has got China covered’ if the U.S. doesn’t participate

“If the United States doesn’t want to partake, participate in China, Huawei has got China covered, and Huawei has got everybody else covered,” Huang said.

In addition, Huang is concerned about the strategic importance of U.S. companies not having access to China.

“It’s even more important that the American technology stack is what AI developers around the world build on,” Huang said.

Just reading between the lines somewhat — Huang sees a world where Chinese AI tech advances. Some countries may decide to build their AI infrastructure with Chinese companies rather than American. That in turn could give Chinese companies a chance to be in the AI race.

Quantum, robotics and driverless is the future

Nvidia boss Jensen Huang delivers a speech on stage talking about robotics.

Arjun Kharpal | CNBC

During his keynote at GTC Paris on Wednesday, he also address quantum computing, saying the technology is reaching “an inflection point.”

Quantum computers are widely believed to be able to solve complex problems that classic computers can’t. This could include things like discovering new drugs or materials.

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Tesla faces protests in Austin over Musk’s robotaxi plans

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Tesla faces protests in Austin over Musk's robotaxi plans

In an aerial view, a Tesla showroom at 12845 N. US 183 Highway Service Road is seen after police were called for a suspicious device in Austin, Texas, on March 24, 2025.

Brandon Bell | Getty Images

With Elon Musk looking to June 22 as his tentative start date for Tesla’s pilot robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, protesters are voicing their opposition.

Public safety advocates and political protesters, upset with Musk’s work with the Trump administration, joined together in downtown Austin on Thursday to express their concerns about the robotaxi launch. Members of the Dawn Project, Tesla Takedown and Resist Austin say that Tesla’s partially automated driving systems have safety problems.

Tesla sells its cars with a standard Autopilot package, or a premium Full Self-Driving option (also known as FSD or FSD supervised), in the U.S. Automobiles with these systems, which include features like automatic lane keeping, steering and parking, have been involved in dozens of collisions, some fatal, according to data tracked by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Tesla’s robotaxis, which Musk showed off in a video clip on X earlier this week, are new versions of the company’s popular Model Y vehicles, equipped with a future release of Tesla’s FSD software. That “unsupervised” FSD, or robotaxi technology, is not yet available to the public.

Tesla critics with The Dawn Project, which calls itself a tech-safety and security education business, brought a version of Model Y with relatively recent FSD software (version 2025.14.9) to show residents of Austin how it works.

In their demonstration on Thursday, they showed how a Tesla with FSD engaged zoomed past a school bus with a stop sign held out and ran over a child-sized mannequin that they put in front of the vehicle.

Dawn Project CEO Dan O’Dowd also runs Green Hills Software, which sells technology to Tesla competitors, including Ford and Toyota.

Stephanie Gomez, who attended the demonstration, told CNBC that she didn’t like the role Musk had been playing in the government. Additionally, she said she has no confidence in Tesla’s safety standards and said there’s been a lack of transparency from Tesla regarding how its robotaxis will work.

Another protester, Silvia Revelis, said she also opposed Musk’s political activity, but that safety is the biggest concern.

“Citizens have not been able to get safety testing results,” she said. “Musk believes he’s above the law.”

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

— Todd Wiseman contributed to this report.

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