Written by: Ryan Weeks, Bloomberg
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
Once viewed by the U.S. as a national security threat and mired in controversies over miner security and remote control, Bitmain is the absolute dominant player in the global Bitcoin mining machine industry. This mysterious Chinese company, after facing a White House ban and a Department of Homeland Security investigation, unexpectedly formed a crucial business alliance with Eric Trump, the second son of Donald Trump.
On one side is the Chinese mining giant questioned for endangering power grids and military bases; on the other is a Bitcoin company under the U.S. President's family. Together, they are building a super mining farm in Texas, launching a heavyweight collaboration. This article还原 (restores) this alliance intertwined with politics and cryptocurrency, revealing how Bitmain逆风翻盘 (turned the tables) from the U.S. "ban list" to become one of the Trump family's most critical business partners. The following is the full translation:
Mining Empire: The Mysterious and Monopolistic Bitmain
From dedicated data centers in the rural Texas countryside to converted lumber mills in Borneo, rows upon rows of shoebox-shaped machines stand, emitting a deafening roar, sometimes drawing complaints from neighbors. Each machine contains hundreds of Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), produced at high cost by advanced factories in Taiwan. These chips are soldered onto three enclosed hashboards, performing brute-force calculations, with all instructions issued by a control board. Depending on the model, the machines use built-in fans or liquid cooling systems to prevent components from overheating, consuming massive amounts of electricity wherever they are located.
These devices have only one purpose: cracking Bitcoin's underlying algorithm, SHA‐256. SHA‐256 is a so-called one-way function, meaning the only way to solve the mathematical puzzles it generates is through constant trial and error. Bitcoin miners make a living from this; once they calculate correctly, they gain the right to verify others' transactions and receive Bitcoin rewards. Therefore, their profits directly depend on how many calculations these devices, named "Antminers," can attempt per second: currently trillions of times. A top-tier Antminer sells for up to $17,400. Large mining companies own up to 500,000 miners, with upfront investments reaching billions of dollars, but this capital expenditure is insignificant compared to potential returns, at least when cryptocurrency prices are high. Some users compare it to owning a row of lottery ticket printers, but with a much higher probability of winning.
The Antminer is the flagship product of Bitmain Technologies Ltd. The company not only dominates the Bitcoin miner production industry but, for most of its history, it practically was the industry itself, with a market share exceeding 80%. Few companies globally achieve such absolute dominance: Alphabet Inc. in search is one; going back decades, perhaps De Beers at its peak, which controlled over three-quarters of the world's diamond production; even further back, institutions like the Dutch East India Company that monopolized long-distance spice trade. But unlike these historical monopolists, much about Bitmain remains a mystery.
Bitmain miners in a Chinese mining farm, 2017
The company is not publicly listed, and its website does not publish the location of its global headquarters, the name of its CEO, or its board members. The figure most associated with it is co-founder Jihan Wu, who rarely appears in public and is no longer chairman, but it is unclear when he stepped down, who succeeded him, or even if there is a successor. Until recent months, Bitmain spokespersons consistently refused to clarify even the most basic corporate structure and governance information, including the identities of major shareholders. As the company sells multiple miner models at different price points, estimates of its annual revenue vary widely. An executive who works closely with Bitmain and requested anonymity, citing internal research, estimated its annual sales to be between $2 billion and $3 billion. But even this figure is, at best, an educated guess.
However, two things are clear: First, Bitmain is headquartered in China; Second, it has formed an alliance with a child of President Donald Trump. Trump's second son, Eric Trump, is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Miami-based American Bitcoin Corp. The company went public in New York last September, and his stake was valued at approximately $548 million at that time. (The stock price has fallen significantly since then amid a broader sell-off in crypto assets.) Eric's older brother, Donald Trump Jr., is also an investor, with an undisclosed stake size. American Bitcoin stated that it plans to procure thousands of Bitmain Antminers, ultimately becoming the world's largest Bitcoin mining company, and has partnered with the Chinese company to develop a large data center in Texas.
This cooperation is a stunning reversal for Bitmain. Not long ago, it faced potentially existential challenges: escalating U.S. investigations questioning whether its equipment constitutes a national security threat. In May 2024, the White House ordered the removal of thousands of Bitmain miners from a mining site near a U.S. Air Force nuclear missile base. Last year, a report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence warned that the presence of Bitmain miners near some military bases "poses an unacceptable risk." In November, Bloomberg News reported, citing a U.S. official and other informed sources, that Bitmain had been the focus of a U.S. Department of Homeland Security investigation to determine whether Antminers could be remotely controlled to sabotage power grids or repurposed for espionage. Sources said this investigation, dubbed "Operation Red Sun," began during the Biden administration and continued at least into the early days of Trump's second term, with the National Security Councils of both administrations discussing it.
Bitmain did not respond to detailed inquiries about potential security risks but said in a December statement that it complies with all applicable laws and that reports it was under investigation were "seriously inconsistent with the facts and false news." An American Bitcoin spokesperson said the company "adheres to strict standards on national security, grid stability, and operational safety" and "believes that mining hardware, when deployed according to modern industrial security standards, does not pose a threat to the U.S. grid or national security."
Bitmain's Irene Gao, photographed in 2025
The current progress of "Operation Red Sun" remains unclear; the Department of Homeland Security told Bloomberg Businessweek it "cannot comment on ongoing investigations." But Bitmain's cooperation with American Bitcoin continues, and its aggressive push into the U.S. has not stopped. In recent months, the company has opened up slightly to the outside world. For this article, Bitmain arranged an interview with Global Sales Director Irene Gao. She praised Trump's pro-crypto policies as "a very good thing in the view of most of our customers," but avoided simple questions such as the names of core managers besides CEO Yang Cunyong. "We just don't want to disclose any company information in this way," Irene Gao said.
Security Shadows: U.S. National Security Investigations and Containment
Beyond speculators seeking quick riches, the crypto industry has attracted two types of people since its inception: tech geeks and true believers. The former focus primarily on the computing and mathematical challenges of creating and trading digital assets; the latter are obsessed with the potential of these tools to change global finance.
The two Chinese entrepreneurs who founded Bitmain恰好 (happened to) belong to these two camps. Micree Zhan (詹克团) is a chip designer by training who previously founded a startup developing TV set-top boxes. Jihan Wu was an investment analyst who became obsessed with cryptocurrency; notably, he was the one who translated the original classic Bitcoin whitepaper from English into Chinese. Their collaboration began over dinner in Beijing in 2013. Zhan once said he went to Wikipedia the next morning to look up information on cryptocurrency and immediately decided to start a business with Wu. According to multiple people who have had contact with both and requested anonymity for fear of reprisal, the two share some characteristics: both are somewhat socially awkward, have maintained extreme低调 (low profiles) for most of their careers, rarely appearing publicly or giving interviews; sources said both can become irritable under pressure, and the deep, hoarse-voiced Zhan has been witnessed loudly berating employees in the office, audible throughout the building.
When Zhan and Wu founded Bitmain in 2013, Bitcoin mining was not dominated by giant data centers operated by listed companies as it is today. It was a world where enthusiasts fr chased the latest cutting-edge equipment. That year, Bitcoin broke $1,000 for the first time; the cryptocurrency was still in its infancy, with the vast majority of coins yet to be mined. At that time, better miners could still带来 (bring) a significant increase in the network's hashrate, a measure of the computational power needed to process transactions. As long as miners could get their hands on the most advanced machines quickly, they were guaranteed profits.
Bitmain employees, 2017
Bitmain launched its first miner, the Antminer S1, in November 2013. By today's standards, it was very rudimentary, even lacking a casing, with hash boards and wiring exposed. But as one of the earliest miners based on ASIC chips and arguably the most powerful device at the time, it represented a qualitative leap over competitors and pushed the industry towards specialized hardware. Subsequent generations of Antminers made even greater strides, with each iteration almost redefining the market: if miners didn't buy the latest model, they simply couldn't compete.
Bitcoin's price surged over 250% in 2017, further driving demand for Antminers. A private funding round in mid-2018 valued Bitmain at $12 billion. Its growth attracted widespread attention; a further funding round in August 2018 even landed on Jeffrey Epstein's desk. Communications between the disgraced financier and his advisors, released by the U.S. Department of Justice in January of this year, show Epstein was eager to invest up to $3 million in Bitmain's holding company but had some concerns about the deal structure. The documents do not indicate whether this investment ultimately went through.
Shortly after this communication, Bitmain applied for a listing in Hong Kong, disclosing revenue of $2.5 billion, a significant increase from $137 million two years earlier. The prospectus showed that Zhan held about 36% of the shares at the time, and Wu held about 20%, both paper billionaires. Other shareholders included Sequoia Capital China, IDG Capital, and Coatue. But betting wealth on rising cryptocurrency prices also meant facing disaster when prices fell. As the market crashed again, the listing plans were eventually shelved. The entire industry entered the so-called "crypto winter," a prolonged period of low prices. Meanwhile, the partnership between Zhan and Wu showed cracks. According to informed sources who requested anonymity, the disagreement stemmed from a strategic dispute: Zhan wanted Bitmain to enter the artificial intelligence field, adapting its chips for applications like training facial recognition technology; Wu, the crypto true believer, opposed deviating from the company's original mission.
In late 2019, Wu attempted to take full control of the company, and Zhan was removed from his positions as legal representative and chairman of Bitmain. Zhan immediately filed a lawsuit in the Cayman Islands, where Bitmain's holding company is registered. A prolonged power struggle ensued, culminating dramatically: a physical altercation at a government office in Beijing. Former journalist Hazel Hu witnessed the scene in 2020. She recalled that while Zhan was waiting at the Haidian District Market Supervision Bureau to collect Bitmain's paper business license, his supporters clashed with Wu's supporters present, with both sides wrestling over the documents. Police soon arrived from a nearby station to stop the conflict, which had spilled downstairs and into the street.
The following year, Wu admitted defeat and resigned as Bitmain's CEO and chairman. (The dispute was eventually settled; Wu is now chairman of miner manufacturer Bitdeer Group and a crypto investment platform.) Despite internal turmoil, Bitmain continued to expand, especially after Bitcoin prices resumed their upward trend in 2020. As the mathematical puzzle between mining companies and profits became more complex, Antminers became essential. "They are the most efficient devices available today," said Vishnu Mackenchery, Senior Director of Corporate Development at U.S. company Compass Mining.
Antminers being assembled at a factory in Shenzhen
At the time, Bitmain's sales were highly concentrated in its home market. Data from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance showed that China accounted for about three-quarters of the global Bitcoin mining hashrate in 2019. But in 2021, the Chinese government cracked down severely on the crypto mining industry, citing high energy consumption and carbon emissions. The result was a massive exodus of miners to regions with relatively cheap electricity and a friendly regulatory environment—conditions particularly found in parts of the United States. As a miner manufacturer rather than a mining company, Bitmain was not shut down and continued to operate in Beijing, establishing distribution centers across Southeast Asia. But from then on, its future would be determined by the United States.
After China's policy shift, Bitmain increased sales to U.S. miners and expanded a side business managing mining operations for American clients. To create a public face for the company in the U.S., it also transferred Irene Gao stateside. Gao joined Bitmain shortly after graduating university in 2016 and, upon first arriving in the U.S., spent years dragging suitcases between cities promoting products to clients. As with much information about Bitmain, sales figures and market share during this period remain opaque, but industry veterans say it undoubtedly became the dominant player.
However, the company soon felt the impact of geopolitical tensions. During Trump's first administration, the White House imposed 25% tariffs on various Chinese-made electronics, and Bitmain began shipping products via Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia—a common practice for Chinese manufacturers but one U.S. authorities viewed as violating customs rules. President Biden largely maintained these tariffs, and in 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection inspected a shipment of Antminers destined for Connecticut-based miner Sphere 3D Corp. Upon disassembling one device, officials found tiny "Made in China" labels on internal components. According to Sphere 3D's then-CEO Patricia Trompeter, the shipment of 4,000 miners was detained for three months. Fearing further delays, some miners began diversifying risk by shifting orders to competitors who had already set up production bases in the U.S., which Bitmain had not done at the time.
The most serious allegations against Bitmain were far more lethal than tariff evasion: whether its miners could be tampered with for purposes other than mining. Suspicions had circulated in crypto circles since 2017, when an industry media outlet claimed Antminers had built-in code allowing Bitmain to remotely shut them down. The company quickly confirmed the code's existence but said its purpose was legitimate—to disable miners if stolen, similar to Apple allowing users to lock a lost iPhone. Bitmain subsequently stated it had removed the feature, but two years later, tech bloggers found similar code; the company then released a security patch.
According to one person familiar with internal confidential deliberations who requested anonymity, during the Biden administration, U.S. officials commissioned studies to assess whether Bitmain miners and other China-made miners could pose a national security risk. The person said the investigation revolved around two different angles: First, whether the miners could be used for espionage. Crypto hardware experts believe this possibility is extremely low, if not impossible, given their highly specialized engineering. Second, and more emphasized by the U.S. government: the potential impact of remote shutdowns on the U.S. power grid.
When a large electricity user (e.g., a steel mill) goes offline, it's usually a planned, gradual process, with power consumption declining over two days or more. A Bitcoin mining farm can consume comparable power but can shut down in seconds. The person said U.S. officials worried such a "shock event" could create a sudden imbalance between power generation and consumption, potentially destabilizing the power supply. The worst-case scenario: Chinese authorities remotely order the shutdown of thousands of Bitmain miners located near military bases or other critical infrastructure relying on the same power source. "Anyone who hacks into an entire data center, whether it's AI, crypto, or cloud services, could cause serious damage to the grid," said Michael Bedford Taylor, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington, though he cautioned that Bitmain itself was unlikely to have the motive to do so.
In the spring of 2024, the Biden administration publicly expressed security concerns about a mining site. Located on 12 acres near Cheyenne, Wyoming, a company with Chinese links had installed up to 15,000 miners there, mostly from Bitmain. The site's investors hoped it would one day become one of the largest in the U.S., benefiting from Wyoming's low land costs and abundant power. It happened to be about a mile from Warren Air Force Base, one of three bases where the U.S. Air Force deploys land-based nuclear missiles.
On May 13, 2024, Biden issued an executive order forcing the site operator, MineOne Partners LLC, to shut down the project. The document stated that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) had "identified national security risks." Although it did not explicitly mention grid concerns, the order noted that the risks included "the presence of specialized equipment sourced from foreign adversaries that could facilitate surveillance and espionage." The miners were soon loaded onto trucks and removed.
Political Alliance: Partnering with the Trump Family to Turn the Tables
It was a major and public setback, with the U.S. government explicitly linking Bitmain equipment to at least the possibility of malicious use. But just a few months later, the company began advancing a project that could completely change its situation.
A Bitmain mining farm in China, 2017
According to Eric Trump's crypto business partner, Chinese-Canadian businessman Michael Ho, the series of meetings that led the president's son to start a Bitcoin mining company began in late 2024. Like Bitmain co-founder Jihan Wu, Ho is a true believer who likes to boast about mining his first Bitcoin as a teenager, under the legal drinking age. When he met Eric, he and his partner Asher Genoot were running Miami-based mining company Hut 8 Corp., a significant customer of Bitmain's Antminers.
Ho recalled they initially met "through many mutual friends in the Florida circle." He said the relationship warmed quickly after several meetings in and around Miami, including a discussion at the Trump National Golf Club Jupiter. Eric Trump, long an executive in the family real estate business, was becoming increasingly involved in crypto. After earlier calling Bitcoin a scam, his father had embraced the industry on the campaign trail, promising at a Nashville conference to make the U.S. a "Bitcoin superpower." In September 2024, the Trump family launched an entity called World Liberty Financial, with the grand yet vague vision of giving "everyone access to the tools and opportunities long restricted."
Initially, World Liberty Financial seemed like a failure, with speculators largely ignoring its debut token. These tokens neither entitled holders to a share of company revenue nor could be resold after purchase, completely违背 (defying) the purpose of traditional investment. But after Trump's re-election, things changed rapidly: prices for various digital assets soared, and businesspeople hoping to get close to the presidential family and access resources poured money into its numerous enterprises. The Wall Street Journal reported in February that Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a key member of Abu Dhabi's ruling family, agreed to invest $500 million in World Liberty Financial just before the presidential inauguration.
American Bitcoin co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eric Trump and CEO Michael Ho during a Bloomberg Television interview in New York, September last year
Ho said persuading Eric to enter the mining industry wasn't difficult. "After we met face-to-face and got to know each other better, we hit it off very quickly," he said in an interview with Bloomberg News last year. In March 2025, the two unveiled their complexly structured plan to the public. Just a month earlier, Eric and Donald Jr. had co-founded American Data Centers. Now, Hut 8 would acquire an 80% stake in that company using miners as payment instead of cash or stock. After acquiring all of Hut 8's Bitmain miners, American Data Centers renamed itself American Bitcoin. Presentations to investors proclaimed the new enterprise's goal was "to become the world's largest and most efficient professional Bitcoin miner, while building a strong strategic Bitcoin reserve."
Just months later, American Bitcoin decided to go public, not through the信息披露 (disclosure) and scrutiny of a traditional IPO, but by merging with a small company, Gryphon Digital Mining Inc.—a method often used by crypto companies and gaining regulatory acceptance. Ho serves as CEO, Genoot as Executive Chairman. Eric handles business strategy, but given his numerous other business interests, his time commitment is expected to be quite limited. An American Bitcoin spokesperson said Eric is "a core member of the company's leadership team."
All this ultimately led to an awkward situation. As a candidate, Donald Trump had promised to ensure Bitcoin was "mined, minted, and made in the USA," yet American Bitcoin relied entirely on Chinese-made Antminers. And just a year earlier, the Biden administration had characterized these same miners as a potential national security threat; now they were supposed to make money for the next president's two sons. Perhaps aware of these contradictions, and the overall "America First" sentiment, Bitmain soon announced adjustments to some business plans. Irene Gao said the company would establish a new headquarters and assembly line in Texas or Florida, hiring 250 local employees.
Bitmain's circuit boards
As these plans progressed, Ho downplayed security concerns about Bitmain's products. "It's been well-documented that these ASIC chips are programmed for one purpose only, and that is to compute for the SHA‐256 algorithm," he said in a September interview with Bloomberg Television. He described choosing Bitmain miners as procuring the most advanced technology: "Bitmain remains the most competitive, the most efficient."
Even with the most powerful equipment, Bitcoin mining is harder to profit from than ever. Over the past six months, Bitcoin's price has fallen over 40% to around $74,000 per coin, and about 95% of the fixed supply has been mined. American Bitcoin's stock price is down nearly 90% from its peak last September, with a market capitalization of about $960 million. On February 26, the company reported a fourth-quarter loss of $59 million. Nonetheless, Eric's association with the company has brought him substantial gains. Filings show no indication he invested significant capital when the company was formed, but at the current stock price, his stake is worth approximately $75 million. If Bitcoin rebounds, whether due to government policy changes or other market factors, the value of his and his brother Donald Jr.'s holdings would likely rise significantly.
Bitmain is working with customers to address allegations of security vulnerabilities. Months after the Biden administration ordered the removal of Bitmain miners near the Wyoming nuclear missile base, U.S. mining company CleanSpark Inc. took over the site. The company soon reinstalled miners purchased from Bitmain's U.S. subsidiary, with contracts stipulating all equipment was "not of origin China" or any country sanctioned by the U.S. CleanSpark said in a statement it prioritizes national security and operates "fully legally," adding that its operating agreement in Wyoming was "finalized only after receiving approval from CFIUS."
Meanwhile, American Bitcoin is expanding its cooperation with Bitmain. The company disclosed in a September filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it would purchase over 16,000 additional Antminers. The terms were unusual: the company didn't need to pay cash but would pay by "staking" Bitcoin, at an undisclosed price—effectively an option structure exercisable at any time within two years. Some industry experts viewed this arrangement, particularly the long exercise period, as extremely generous to American Bitcoin.
Another joint project between the two companies is taking shape in the Texas Panhandle: a data center the size of five football fields, likely one of the largest Bitcoin mining farms in the world. Bitmain and American Bitcoin co-designed the project, named Vega, which began operations in June. According to Michael Ho, the farm is equipped with new liquid-cooled Antminers.
Bitmain views American Bitcoin more as a partner than just a customer. Last year, Irene Gao and Genoot appeared together at the Bitcoin Asia cryptocurrency conference in Hong Kong. Sitting on stage with a large image of the Vega project behind them, reportedly costing $500 million to build, Gao proclaimed that Bitmain's latest miner, the S23 Hydro Antminer, had received over $1 billion in pre-orders. The utilitarian gray machine costs $17,400 each. "These machines will all be produced in the U.S.," she said.
The next day, Gao received a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter for an interview in her suite at the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong on the waterfront. She emphasized that Antminer sales and joint projects like Vega were just the beginning of Bitmain's collaboration with American Bitcoin. "We can be very flexible in cooperating with them, doing complete customization according to their needs," she said. "We deploy the miners in their infrastructure, which we can either bundle and sell to our customers or sell to their affiliated companies." But she repeatedly declined to answer more specific questions about the relationship between the two companies.
The topic Gao most wanted to discuss was her optimism about Bitcoin's future, and especially Bitmain's. She said her confidence stemmed partly from the development of conferences like this one. "You see a lot of influential people," she said, not just crypto enthusiasts but also representatives from traditional finance. That included the heavyweight speaker scheduled for the next day: Eric Trump. He would electrify the crowd with an振奋人心的 (inspiring) prediction: Bitcoin's price would surpass $1 million, about 14 times its current level. "It's a good signal," Irene Gao said of the attendance, "a scene of prosperity."
