The Publicly listed Chinese Bitcoin mining firm has already begun the transition from China to Kazakhstan.
BIT Mining has announced it is on schedule to ship around 2,500 bitcoin miners from their headquarters in Shenzhen to Kazakhstan. The mining firm was formerly known as 500.com, an online sports lottery firm, but rebranded last year into a bitcoin mining operation. The move is in response to a subsidiary of BIT Mining being asked to cease operations by the Sichuan government late last week.
BIT Mining, along with 25 other mining firms in the area, is now on the hunt for alternative locations to continue working.
According to the press release, the company has already completed the delivery of its first shipment of mining equipment to Kazakhstan. The announcement stated that the first batch of hardware contained 320 bitcoin mining machines with “a theoretical maximum total hash rate capacity of 18.2 PH/s is expected.”
The confirmed shipment will be followed up by a second and third bundle, adding 2,600 machines to the current batch. Upon activation, it will allow for a theoretical max hash rate of 102.3PH/s. The equipment currently in Kazakhstan will be operational by June 27, according to BIT Mining. The remaining shipments are expected to arrive before July 2021.
The release adds that BIT Mining has plans to ship whatever machines they have left to overseas data centers over the next few quarters.
Sichuan-based miners being forced to relocate
The move to Kazakhstan is incredibly expensive and inconvenient for BIT Mining. So why are they doing it in the first place? The move, along with similar recent stories, is in response to China continuing to crackdown on cryptocurrency mining nationwide. In this case, authorities have ordered that 26 mining operations in Sichuan must be shut down and cease the use of hydropower resources.
While BIT Mining itself wasn’t one of those 26 companies, an indirectly held subsidiary was. Ganzi Changhe Hydropower Consumption Service Co. was the target of officials and was given notice by the State Grid Sichuan Ganzi Electric Power Co. that their supply of electricity would be halted. The company halted operations immediately after receiving the news. The Ganzi Changhe Data Center made up around 3% of the total revenue of BIT Mining during May.
CEO of BIT Mining, Xianfeng Yang, concluded the release by stating that “We are committed to protecting the environment and lowering our carbon footprint. “We have been strategically expanding our operations overseas as part of our growth strategy. Following our investments in cryptocurrency mining data centers in Texas and Kazakhstan, we are accelerating our overseas development for alternative high-quality mining resources.”
Along with Kazakhstan, Texas has been a popular landing spot for displaced cryptocurrency miners due to the wealth of renewable energy and the low cost of operation.
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