A False Start on the Road to an All-American Bitcoin
Jun 20, 2025 5:30 AM Donald Trump pledged to cement the US as the bitcoin mining capital of the planet. The president's sweeping tariffs stand to simultaneously undermine and advance that ambition in one swoop. PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: WIRED STAFF; GETTY IMAGES
US president Donald Trump waited a beat to soak up the applause. In front of a baying crowd of bitcoiners at crypto conference Bitcoin 2024 in July, he had just laid out his plan to turn the US into the world's undisputed bitcoin mining superpower. 'I want it to be mined, minted, and made in the USA,' he told the audience. 'You're going to be very happy with me—you're going to be so happy.'
Since returning to the White House, Trump has largely followed through on his crypto-related pledges: He has moved to establish a national bitcoin reserve, replaced the leader of the regulatory agency that pursued crypto firms most hotly under the prior administration, and appointed a crypto czar to help set clear rules for the industry. But with respect to bitcoin mining, the US president has so far given with one hand and taken with the other.
When Trump announced punitive new tariffs on 57 countries on April 2, US-based mining companies dependent on two dominant Chinese suppliers—including American Bitcoin, the Trump family's new mining outfit—faced the prospect of spiraling hardware costs. The tariffs included a levy on shipments from China later revised to 55 percent, and tariffs between 24 and 36 percent on Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia, in which Chinese firms manufacture some of their machines. But meanwhile, the tariffs promised a leg-up to smaller US manufacturers, whose American-made machines are not subject to the steep new import levies.
The ability for US-based hardware makers to seize upon any tariff-related advantage will depend, though, on whether their prospective customers, the US mining firms, can withstand a period of acute economic instability that those same tariffs stand to aggravate. To guarantee supply, mining companies often enter into long-term agreements with hardware makers, so they face the prospect of paying the new import duty on unfulfilled orders with the Chinese suppliers. Already, US mining companies are pivoting to AI and other data center operations in search of more reliable profits. The aspiration for an all-American bitcoin—mined on US soil by a US company, using hardware made in the US—could fall apart at the outset.
'If things continue like they are right now, mining will continue to be pushed out of the US,' says Chris Bendiksen, bitcoin research lead at investment firm CoinShares. 'We might have seen the zenith of US mining.'
In a statement to WIRED, White House spokesperson Kush Desai rejected the idea that tariffs threaten to undermine Trump's ambitions for the bitcoin mining industry. 'Two things can be accomplished at once,' he said, describing the aim to both onshore hardware manufacturing and use energy policy as a lever to reduce cost for bitcoin mining firms.
Bitcoin mining is a hardware arms race: To win the right to process a batch of transactions and claim the associated bitcoin reward, mining companies compete in a race to solve a computational puzzle. To ensure their fleet is sufficiently powerful to beat out competitors, miners must constantly replace old and weatherbeaten hardware with the latest, most advanced machines.
In the mining hardware market, two Chinese manufacturers—Bitmain and MicroBT—are king. The pair are estimated by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF), an offshoot of the University of Cambridge, to control a combined 97 percent of the market. Plenty of challengers have tried to break the oligopoly, but failed to compete on hardware performance or reach the necessary economies of scale. 'The road is lined with the corpses of people who have tried that,' says Bendiksen.
However, the pressure applied to mining companies buying from Chinese hardware suppliers under the new tariff regime has forced some to confront their import dependency—and search for a workaround.
The company best placed to take advantage is Auradine, a Santa Clara–based mining hardware manufacturer, analysts say. In its three years in operation, Auradine has failed to wrench market share away from Bitmain and MicroBT, which have wielded pricing power to preserve their dominant position, Auradine has previously alleged. MicroBT did not respond to a request for comment. 'We welcome fair competition, because when miners win the whole ecosystem grows,' says Irene Gao, president of mining at Bitmain.) But since Trump announced the new tariffs, Auradine has fielded an influx of requests from US mining firms wanting to diversify their hardware fleets, claims Rajiv Khemani, its cofounder and CEO.
Though there are small hardware challengers other than Auradine—among them Bitfury, Iceriver, iPollo, and BIT Mining—none were founded in the US. 'We have a very strong pull,' claims Khemani. 'We are seeing incredible interest in our customer base in making sure that in whatever environment we end up in, mining operators are hedged' against tariff risk.
To capitalize, Auradine recently released an updated and extended range of bitcoin mining hardware, and raised an additional $153 million in Series C funding. The company will soon announce new high-profile customers signed in the wake of Trump's tariff announcement, according to Khemani.
The company's headline client is US-based MARA Holdings, a publicly traded bitcoin mining firm that helped to launch Auradine and now owns an $85.4 million equity stake in the business. Though Auradine products account for only a small proportion of the hardware deployed at MARA facilities, they make up around half of the machines the mining company has ordered in 2025, says Fred Thiel, MARA CEO.
'In an environment where you have geopolitical risk and tariff risk and can buy a US-made miner at the same price as a Chinese-made miner, would you buy the US-made miner, all else being equal? Yes,' says Thiel. 'If the next shoe to drop is a prohibition of import of Chinese miners and you have placed a $300 million order and paid a deposit, you are in a difficult situation.'
The degree to which Auradine stands to gain by the tariffs, however, will depend to some extent on the ability of US-based mining firms to withstand the weight of those same tariffs, as applied to their preexisting hardware orders.
The timing could barely be less opportune: Though the rising price of bitcoin has helped, other factors—fierce competition, a slump in transaction fees, diminishing bitcoin rewards, and so on—have whittled down margins for mining companies, analysts say.
Mining firms are also facing heightened competition for limited energy resources in the US, mostly from AI companies flush with venture funding. New projections from the US Department of Energy indicate that, by 2028, AI could consume the equivalent amount of electricity as 22 percent of US households. 'Miners have always been scrappy buyers. They are kind of the vultures of the power grid,' says Bendiksen. 'The AI companies are outbidding—they are just willing to pay more.'
The tariff hikes alone are not enough to drive bitcoin miners out of the US; by comparison to the price of energy, say, the cost of a hardware import levy has only a small impact on the viability of a mining operation, claims Thiel. But as an aggravating factor in an already unfavorable environment, they matter.
'Typically, this type of shock would lead to consolidation,' says Thiemo Fetzer, a professor of economics at the University of Warwick, referring to the tariffs. 'A priori, one would expect a cull of small miners because of the rising cost of equipment and greater supply chain uncertainty.'
Bitcoin mining firms operating in the US—including Riot Platforms, Bitfarms, MARA, CoreWeave, Core Scientific, Hut 8, Iris Energy, and others—are already scrambling to diversify out of the mining market, reworking their facilities to accommodate AI training and high-performance computing. Only few large outfits, like CleanSpark, remain committed to bitcoin mining exclusively.
'Most of the miners are throwing in the towel,' says Bendiksen. 'I think a lot of people were going down this route before the tariffs. But tariffs have probably confirmed the validity of that strategy.'
Some, among them MARA, are choosing to expand their mining operations into countries other than the US, negating tariff risk. 'Why do you want to have a lot of international business? It eliminates single-bullet regime risk,' says Thiel. 'I'm a big believer in you have to have optionality as a bitcoin miner.'
Meanwhile, Bitmain and MicroBT are ramping up manufacturing capacity within the US, potentially eroding part of the value proposition—tariff immunity—currently pushing buyers towards companies like Auradine. 'We're actively investing in the US, including manufacturing,' says Gao.
For now, bitcoin mining firms are in a holding pattern. Until the 90-day pause on Trump's new tariffs comes to an end in July, the extent of their financial impact will remain uncertain—and firms are delaying hardware procurement decisions accordingly. 'I think people are looking at where things will bottom out on the tariffs,' says Khemani.
On their face, Trump's tariffs stand at odds with his stated ambitions for the US bitcoin mining industry, even as his own sons forge into the sector. 'The tariffs are clearly destructive,' claims Bendiksen.
To achieve both ends—to drive business towards US-based bitcoin mining hardware makers, whilst lending support to bitcoin mining firms facing deteriorating economics in the US—would require Trump to pull on other levers to balance out the impact of tariffs. One option would be to prioritize the buildout of new energy generation capacity, analysts say, creating an abundance that in theory would drive down a major input cost for bitcoin mining.
The Trump administration claims that a raft of recent executive orders will combine to reduce energy costs in the US. But so far, the picture on the ground—the deprioritization of bitcoin mining among US firms—indicates that Trump's message about the prospect of all-American bitcoin is 'basically just words,' claims Bendiksen. 'It's just pandering to nationalist feelings.'
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