Rome has secured Brussels’ approval for its plan to cushion households and businesses from high energy costs. For anyone running mining rigs in Italy, the question is whether that relief will reach their electricity meters, and whether it would be enough to matter if it did.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s office announced on October 16 that the government and the European Commission had settled their differences over the “Energy Bills Decree,” Decree-Law 21/2022. Palazzo Chigi said the outcome respects EU state aid rules and followed what it described as “intense and constructive exchanges.”
The stated aim is to limit how far rising gas prices feed into electricity bills, without handing Italian firms an unfair edge inside the single market. Nothing in the statement names data centres, crypto or any specific energy-heavy industry, and no figures on the size of the relief were released.
Once a miner has bought the hardware, power is the bill that never stops. A single Bitmain Antminer S21 XP Imm., rated at 300 TH/s and drawing 4,050 watts, burns through roughly 97 kWh a day, close to 3,000 kWh a month.
Italian wholesale power averaged about €210 per MWh across the country’s six market zones between September 10 and October 9. That is €0.21 per kWh before network fees, taxes and supplier margins are added. At that rate, the electricity needed to produce a single bitcoin on a 13.5 J/TH machine comes to about €143,800, or roughly 684,000 kWh.
The competition is also fierce. As of October 10, Bitcoin’s average hashrate stood near 1,000 EH/s, with difficulty around 132.7 trillion. A lone 300 TH/s machine at that level would take, on average, about 19 years to win a block reward on its own, which is why nearly every small operator joins a pool.
The next halving adds more pressure. With roughly 79,000 blocks left before block 1,050,000, miners have a little over 18 months before their bitcoin income is cut in half while their power bill stays the same.
Newer hardware helps but costs more. Bitmain lists its liquid-cooled S23 XP Hyd. at 600 TH/s and 8.9 J/TH for $15,300, against $2,400 for the less efficient S21 XP Imm.
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});One Italian company is not waiting for cheaper bills. ALPS, a Trentino-based firm founded in 2018 that builds and runs energy-intensive data centres in Italy, Oman, the US and South America, has named telecoms veteran Brian Turnbow as its Technical Director for AI.
The firm plans to build AI and high-performance computing sites alongside its existing mining business, placing them close to where power is generated rather than in congested grid hubs. The pressure on Italy’s grid is visible: data centre connection requests to Terna passed 100 GW by August 31, up from about 30 GW at the end of 2024.a.
Mining is legal in Italy. Under Circular 30/E of October 27, 2023, the Revenue Agency treats rewards paid automatically by the network as outside the scope of VAT, so VAT on equipment cannot be recovered. Income tax treatment depends on whether mining is organized or occasional, and mined holdings must be reported in the RW section of the tax return.
Possibly, but only indirectly. The deal targets households and businesses broadly, and its effect on industrial power prices is not yet clear. Even with relief, Italian miners face high grid-adjusted prices, a rising network difficulty and a halving that will cut their revenue in half within two years.
