The other side of the American AI boom: "working for" Chinese Bitcoin miners

The US AI data center faced a 44 GW power shortfall, but unexpectedly found that the lifesaver was the Bitcoin mining farm. These mining companies, which were once expelled by China's ban, have become the infrastructure supporting the AI computing power of the United States with the power management technology they have cultivated on the banks of the Dadu River in Sichuan. This article originated from Lin Wanwan, and the article "The B-side of American AI: “Working for Chinese Bitcoin Miners” by Beating, was compiled, compiled and written by BlockBeats. (Synopsis: AI is killing miners: “energy run” tears up a new cycle, what kind of fate intersection do mining companies stand on? (Background supplement: CryptoQuant: Bitcoin falls below 94,000 to be considered a bear market; S19 mining machine enters shutdown price brewing enterprises to escape) At the end of 2025, Bitmain, a Chinese encryption equipment company, was included in the US national security review list. On November 21, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security launched Operation Red Sunset, code-named Operation Red Sunset, to push Bitmain to the censorship desk on national security grounds. The terms of the accusation are word-for-word: investigating whether its equipment has remote backdoors will deal a fatal blow to the U.S. power grid at extreme moments. Why is a Chinese miner being pointed at potentially endangering the U.S. power grid? This is America's extreme anxiety about core resources. Because at this moment, Silicon Valley is playing out the most expensive “silence” in the history of science and technology. In the AI data center, tens of thousands of NVIDIA H100 GPUs are lying quietly on the ground eating ashes. These $30,000 chips, which Huang called “industrial gold,” were supposed to run at full speed and breathe soul into GPT-5 or Sora, but at the moment — they had no electricity. The top assets of mankind are now stuck by the most primitive physical bottlenecks. The lack of electricity in the United States has reached an incomprehensible level. The shortfall is 44 GW, which is equivalent to the entire power capacity of a moderately developed country like Switzerland. In this so-called most technologically advanced country, the average wait time for powering up a new AI data center has been stretched to more than 48 months. America's power grid is like a dying old man. In the desperate moment when the AI giants held hundreds of billions of dollars but could not find a socket, they found that the life-saving straw appeared in the place they least looked at - the bitcoin mining farm. Wall Street suddenly realized that what this group of people held in their hands was the most scarce asset in the AI era - the huge amount of electricity that had been contracted with energy companies. But they are realizing that this set of survival rules about “computing power is electricity” has been vividly interpreted by a group of Chinese engineers on the other side of the ocean ten years ago. Because the first circle of “power training grounds” that are now repaired for the American AI era was completed in China as early as ten years ago, and moved to the United States 3 years ago because of a ban. The game between the two sides of the ocean is inherently inevitable. Just as the torrent of the times cannot be changed, a generation has a generation of destiny, and every footnote tells us that greatness cannot be planned. U.S. Power Inherits “Chinese Legacy” History has always had the habit of writing the answer first and then waiting for the person who asked the question to appear. In June 2024, the US bitcoin mining company Core Scientific announced a shocking news on Wall Street: they signed a $3.5 billion agreement with CoreWeave, known as NVIDIA's own son, to lease the electricity infrastructure originally used to mine bitcoin to the latter to train AI models. These news stories caused a sensation in Silicon Valley and were called “computing power marriages”. But on the other side of the ocean in China, the news is a special read for the miners and officials who experienced the May 19 storm. Because Core Scientific, IREN, Cipher and other mining companies, a large part of the infrastructure used to house NVIDIA H100, is actually flowing Chinese genes. To some extent, the first circle of 'power fortifications' in the era of AI in the United States is the industrial heritage after the great diversion of China's computing power. And the person who inadvertently drew the drawings was named Zhan Ketuan. Zhan Ketuan, a typical science and engineering man who graduated from the Institute of Microelectronics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, his original life trajectory should be to write code, draw circuit diagrams, and be a quiet technology bull in a science and technology park. Until 2013, Zhan Ketuan and Wu Jihan established a company, Bitmain. It is said that the Jank group only spent two hours reading the Bitcoin white paper. He doesn't necessarily understand the future of money, but he understands the essence behind the math — it's an arithmetic game about hash collisions. In 2016, Bitmain made a decision that shocked the industry: smashed a huge amount of wafer orders to TSMC (TSMC). The Antminer S9, equipped with TSMC's most advanced 16nm FinFET process, was born, which is not only a production miracle in the history of chips, but also a never-before-seen “thermodynamic furnace”. In the eyes of Jank's group, S9 is a chip; But in the eyes of the State Grid, it is a purely industrial load. It does not rotate day and night like a factory, nor does it fluctuate with temperature. It operates for 24 hours with a smooth straight power curve, regardless of voltage or origin. From that moment on, a new system was born from the world: electricity, from a public service, became a “B-end raw material” that could be instantly priced, traded, and monetized; Electricity, which is difficult to store at a low price once generated, parasitizes its value in a string of numbers in another form; Bitcoin mining is starting to become an industry: from hydropower in the mountains of Sichuan to wind power in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, bitcoin mining machines run on every piece of land in China's electricity redundancy. Zhan Ketuan may not have realized at the time that the set of industry standards he defined for bitcoin mining machines inadvertently rehearsed a perfect energy supply solution for the extremely hungry US AI ten years later. In the craziest year of 2018, Bitmain swallowed 74.5% of the world's share. But this is not the most terrifying, the most terrifying thing is - the remaining share is also all wrapped up by the Chinese. Whether it is the Shenma mining machine founded by Yang Zuoxing, the former chief chip designer of Bitmain, or Canaan Technology, the originator of ASIC, they are all Chinese faces. This is not a global competition at all, but a “civil war of Chinese engineers” spanning 2,000 kilometers: from the Aobei Science and Technology Park in Haidian in Beijing to the Zhi Park in Nanshan, Shenzhen, 99% of the world's computing power beats on China's pulse. An absolute closed loop that is completely locked up by China's supply chain and Silicon Valley has to look up. Until May 2021, with a ban from the regulator, the roar that had lasted for several years on the banks of the Dadu River came to an abrupt end. For the country, this is the end of a power-consuming industry; But for the industry, the beginning of an epic “technological migration”. Thousands of containers were loaded onto freighters and crossed the sea, not only carrying the latest generation of Ant miners designed by Janktuan, but also carrying a unique set of “electric survival philosophy” cultivated in China. One of the destinations: Texas, USA. It has an independent ERCOT grid and has the freest and wildest electricity trading market in the United States. For this group of “computing refugees” from the East, this is simply an enlarged version of “Sichuan + Inner Mongolia”. However, when this group of Chinese really landed, the American energy community was surprised to find that this is a refugee, this is clearly a well-equipped "energy special department…