Will Customs Rates Complete the Golden Age of Bitcoin mining in America?
After China banned crypto in the summer of 2021, a huge part of the mining sector was forced to move – to Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada and other countries with cheap electricity. The largest recipient of this emigration, however, was the United States, which in the last four years has overtaken every other country in the world in terms of hash rate (meaning more Bitcoin is produced in the United States than elsewhere).
Still, President Donald Trump’s customs policies revealed, on April 2, but paused for the time being, threatening to increase the cost of ASICs, the extremely powerful computers used to produce Bitcoin. Only a handful of companies know how to build these ASICs, and most of their production facilities are located in Southeast Asia, in nations facing approx. 10% to 50% duty.
While the new taxes are likely to make it unaffordable expensive for US-based miners to import new machines, they are likely to slow the industry’s expansion in the country, several experts told Coindesk.
“The United States will still be the biggest source of hashrate globally in the foreseeable future, but its overall dominance is likely to erode as Bitcoin Mining becomes a much more global business,” said Tara’s Kortyk, CEO of Bitcoin Hardware Firm Synteq Digital.
“We definitely want to see HashRate Plateau in terms of relative growth,” he added. “Other countries come into space in a big way. Pakistan announced just that it will dedicate two gigawatts of power to Bitcoin mining. There are all sorts of projects happening in Ethiopia and abroad. They will certainly take a lot of hashrat capacity growth.”
Tariffs are only a piece of a much larger puzzle. Other factors, such as the enormous demand for new data centers dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI) and the diminishing number of ideal US locations for businesses to create mining facilities, probably have a greater impact on a miner’s calculations when it comes to choosing a jurisdiction where to work.
US-based operations are still in the short term capable of utilizing a robust secondary market to acquire mining rigs without paying duty rates. In the long term, Asic producers are taking steps to produce their machines on American soil.
Consensus seems to be that far from destroying Bitcoin mining in the United States is simply propagating to be a new variable that the fast, hyper-competitive industry has to fight.
Biting the ball
Tariffs mostly presented a challenge to miners in April because of how sudden and steep they were. Miners and logistics companies rushed to push the ASIC shipments into the United States before the policy of the policy to avoid paying significant taxes – only for the White House to push the deadline back for a few months.
Now, however, mining companies have adapted the idea that imported ASICs will cost at least 10% more than they used to do. But there is uncertainty as to whether this is the new normal. The Trump administration is still in the middle of the trade negotiations, and the justice system has not yet made a clear decision on the legality of its new policies.
“It will probably take a long time for us to have a definitive answer to what the tariffs will look like -at least until the Supreme Court weighs in,” Lauren Lin, head of hardware at Bitcoin -hardware company Luxor Technology, told Coindesk in an interview. “We expect it to take a few months, even over a year.”
Meanwhile, Luxor (who also runs a shipping-forwarding business) sees any signs of panic among his clients, although there has been a Uptick in questions about how to prepare for Washington’s political changes, according to Lin. The Asic Secondary Market (where US-based companies also cannot acquire pre-owned, cheaper machines) that brakes, she said. In other words, miners are plodded together.
But there are new difficulties, such as the fact that tariffs also affect imported electric hardware. For example, transformers are mostly manufactured abroad and were already difficult to get before April. Tariffs have only worsened the situation. This has been a greater source of frustration for miners than customs rates at Asics, according to a person working for a crypto trading organization.
Overall, the white house’s original tariffs on Southeast Asian nations should only be seen as a starting point for a policy that is likely to develop over time, Jeff Laberge, head of capital markets and strategic initiatives on Bitcoin Miner Bitdeer told Coindesk in an interview. “We are pretty optimistic that there will be a reasonable result at the end of this,” he said.
Made in America
The ASIC market of $ 30 billion is dominated by Bitmain, a Chinese company whose machines operate approx. 80% of Bitcoin’s hash rate, according to TheminerMag. Its competitors include Microbt, Canaan and Bitdeer.
These companies manufacture the vast majority of their ASICs in Malaysia, Thailand and China, although Microbt already has at least one plant in Pennsylvania, and Bitmain announced in December that it launched a new production line in the United States. Canaan has also completed an American trial, which means it now has the capacity to build Asics in the country if it chooses to do so.
The Trump Administration’s customs duties are managing one of their declared goals (to increase the US industry), incentrosing these ASIC producers to scale up their activities in the country.
Canaan told Coindesk that although production in the United States is expensive, it brings the benefits of being geographically closer to their customers and reducing the risk of the supply chain. The company said it is currently investigating the possibility of collaborating with existing US-based manufacturers for its own purposes. Microbt is also investigating ways to avoid tariffs by increasing US production.
Bitdeer, a new but technologically advanced player in the ASIC scene, looks at the situation as an opportunity to seize the market share from the established. “We want to migrate as much as we can to the United States,” Laberge said. “It will take some time to ramp it up.”
“Being a producer and a miner gives us a huge opportunity because we always have a home for the rigs we produce, whether in our own data centers or with a third party,” he added. Bitdeer has mining in Texas and Ohio, among other places.
The heavy weight, Bitmain, has not communicated new plans to increase American production since the duty was announced in April. But the company is likely to want to demonstrate that it builds in the United States in accordance with the Trump administration’s goal, Synteq’s Kortyk said. Bitmain did not respond to a request for comment.
In any case, consensus seems to be that expanding production capacity in the United States will be a slow and costly process.
“Whether we scale our machine production in the United States depends on our ability to reduce costs as well as demand from our US customers. If demand from US customers is low, manufacture here doesn’t make sense,” Canaan told Coindesk. “In addition, if duty on products from Southeast Asia [end up being] Low, we don’t necessarily have to build our production features in the US. “
The end of a golden age?
So miners are quickly adapting to the new reality for customs rates, and ASIC producers look ready to increase local production. Nevertheless, Bitcoin’s US-based hash rate (currently worth over 40% of the global hash rate) is unlikely to continue to grow as fast as in the last four years.
First, customs rates have influence. Bitcoin mining is a very competitive industry and companies are always looking for ways to reduce costs. If the choice is between opening a new mining in Texas or in Ontario, tariffs may swing the decision in favor of the latter.
More important, however, is the fact that it becomes more difficult to find new US rankings that meet the necessary requirements to spin new Bitcoin mining. “Most of the low hanging fruit is picked in the United States,” Laberge said.
Not to mention that competition has become more intense. Data centers dedicated to high performance computing (HPC) emerge across the country to scale AI capabilities, and the industry’s largest actors-Microsoft, Meta, Google-is deep pockets. If a place is suitable for both mining and HPC, miners are unlikely to win a bidding war.
They wouldn’t necessarily want it either. HPC data centers are more complex and capital -intensive to build, but they also bring in much higher profits; This has led to a number of bitcoin mining companies diversifying to AI.
“HPC Chasing Electrons is the main theme for the next two to 10 years,” Kolkk told Coindesk. “Bitcoin mine workers certainly have goals on the back of acquisition and consolidation in space … As a sector, they are likely to be eaten or occupied by the overall digital calculation.”
This phenomenon is likely to remain contained in the United States due to the technical sophistication required to build and run HPC centers. Political considerations also play a major role in view of the ongoing AI weapon race between the United States and China. In other words, Bitcoin mine workers outside the United States will not be affected by the rapid growth of the HPC industry in the same way.
For US-based miners, the path Forward can no longer expand in terms of megawatts, but in terms of efficiency according to Laberge.
“If you look at the global hash rate right now … most of the rig has an efficiency of 30 Joules per Terahash (J/Th) or higher,” he said. In comparison, Bitmain and Bitdeer’s latest generation machines are closer to 10 J/th in efficiency. “In today’s economy, at best, it is marginally profitable.”
“All these rigs need to be updated,” he continued. “We see this as a $ 4-6 billion a year’s addressing market in the next three to five years.”
Correction (June 24, 2025, 16:30 UTC): Canaan does not investigate to build its own US-based production facilities, as previously mentioned by the article, but Muller the idea of collaborating with existing US producers.
