Rusal, the aluminum holding of the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, will create a special mining center in Russia. It could accumulate almost 1% of total world hash rate.

Rusal will construct a data center in the Nadvoitsky aluminum plant in the Northern Russian region of Karelia, the company said. It will provide high-tech IT services for analysis of large data, machine learning, and cryptocurrency mining. Rusal partnered with AA!LAB, established in Bulgaria by the Russian programmer Alexey Zenkov, Vedomosti reports.

"Cooperation with UC Rusal is one of the pledges of future success in the implementation of the international project Mining Now, which AA!LAB develops with its own equipment and software," Zenkov explained.

The first unit of the data center with 5000 computing units of servers and workstations will be launched by the third quarter of 2018.

The data center will use electricity from the Onda hydroelectric power station, which also belongs to Rusal. Currently, the hydroelectric power station is loaded by no more than 60%.

Rusal did not specify the planned mining capacity of the enterprise, but assuming that the computing units in the data center will not be less powerful than the Bitmain's S9 mining machines, then the hash rate of Rusal's mining center will be about 13 TH/s. The total hash rate of the bitcoin network accounts currently for 11,182,000 TH/s, so Deripaska's enterprise could achieve a world share of 0.6%.