Bitcoin mining ASICs
By raw switching throughput this is the largest computer humanity has ever built — roughly fifty times the world's entire floating-point capacity. It can do exactly one thing: hash a block header twice with SHA-256. It cannot run a model, solve a PDE, or add two decimals. The purest illustration of why operations per second is not compute.
Bitcoin mining ASICs over time
Installed compute in zettaFLOP/s, log scale, 2008 → present. A straight line on this axis means steady exponential growth; the slope is the doubling rate. History before the 2026 anchor is reconstructed — see the methodology.
Network hash rate x ~2,560 integer ops per double-SHA-256 — context only, and not FLOP/s.
~900 EH/s at ~28 J/TH, drawing on the order of 150-200 TWh a year. Marked live from the Bitcoin network.
Why it is excluded: Fixed-function integer hashing, not floating point. Shown at its notional op/s and never summed — the arithmetic simply does not belong in the same total.
driver level 8.881e+20 · fetched 2026-08-25 03:39 UTC