Mining Ethereum in AWS — is it worth it?
At around this time last year I wrote my first article about Mining Bitcoin and Ethereum on AWS and figured out that back then it wasn’t worth it. Over the past year the ETH price has increased from $450 to $4500 — let’s find out whether mining on AWS is finally profitable!
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A lot has happened since I wrote my previous article about mining on AWS:
- The price of 1 ETH has increased 10x from $450 to $4500.
- The network difficulty increased 3-fold from 3.5P to 11P.
- AWS introduced many new GPU-enabled EC2 instance types.
- The end of Ethereum mining is looming with the move to ETH 2.0 and it is fast approaching.
Because of all those developments I decided to spend one lockdown weekend figuring out if mining Ethereum on AWS is profitable at last.
TL;DR
Nope it’s still not. Don’t do it. It’s better than a year ago though!
The best performance per dollar at the moment is achieved by the new g5.xlarge instances running at a spot price. G5 instances use the new NVIDIA Ampere A10g cards and as of now are only available in N. Virginia (us-east-1), Oregon (us-west-2) and Ireland (eu-west-1). More regions should be added over time.
The second best cost efficiency is the last year’s winner g4dn.xlarge — available in 15+ regions and offering NVIDIA Tesla T4 cards. Tried, tested and relatively cheap, it’s a reliable workhorse for crypto mining.
The third place goes to the new p4d.24xlarge sporting 8x top of the line NVIDIA Ampere A100 cards. However this one is an expensive, massive beast that even at a spot price costs almost $10/hour. It comes with 8 GPUs and 96 vCPUs which means that you may have to request a Service limit increase before you can run it. Good luck though — even trying to start it as an On-Demand instance often fails due to the lack of capacity in the regions. Let alone trying Spot —right now the chance of getting p4d.24xlarge on Spot is really slim.
