Bitcoin mining can be a profitable endeavor. Currently, the reward for finding a block is 25 BTC or about 10,000 US dollars at today's market price (Jan 2016). This reward is dispensed every 10 minutes on average. Financial reward is the main reason behind the emergence of Bitcoin mining on an industrial scale. In the last 2-3 years, a few entities have entered into the business of large-scale mining. The miners attempt to gain economies of scale, trying to find the sweet spot where costs are minimized to the optimum level.
Industrial miners face almost the same issues as data centers: access to relatively cheap power, good network access, access to latest hardware, and stable political climate. Then there are the demands of installing a lot of computing hardware inside a building: cooling, monitoring, and maintenance. To make things more difficult, miners get paid in bitcoins but their costs are in fiat currencies (Dollars, Euros, Kronas, and so on).
