Bitcoin miners pivot to South-east Asia after China crackdown

The 6.9ha cement slab in the middle of a Borneo industrial area once belonged to a logging company. Long ago, that business abandoned the site to the elements, leaving just rudimentary structures and a four-storey concrete birdhouse made to lure swiftlets whose nests, built with saliva, fetch high prices in China.

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But in 2023, another industry moved in: bitcoin miners. Sheltered by a vast, sheet-metal roof, more than 1,000 machines now roar away, while hundreds more sit nearby in cardboard boxes waiting to be unpacked.

The site in Tanjung Manis, Sarawak, is the largest of four operations in the area run by miner Bityou. Owner Peter Lim chose the location after he was forced to shutter a larger 10,000 rig, 20-megawatt (MW) operation in China, following a ban on Bitcoin miners in 2021.

He is one of many miners popping up in South-east Asia – not all of them entirely legal, although Mr Lim says Bityou’s operations are above board – after China’s crackdown.

China was once the dominant country for Bitcoin mining, the process of using computing power to solve encryption puzzles in return for new tokens.

In 2019, it accounted for about three-quarters of global activity, according to data collected by Cambridge University.

But when the Chinese authorities declared that any crypto-related transactions would be considered illicit financial activity, the industry was decimated.

“Back then, some of the state governments, they just seize your property,” said Mr Alex Loh, Mr Lim’s colleague at Bityou, in an interview.

Mr Loh said some 3,000 of his machines were seized at a mine he used to run in Inner Mongolia. He was also a stakeholder in a 120MW site in Sichuan province that suffered a similar fate.

“We spent about three months to build that place,” Mr Loh said. “But (after) we started our operation, in less than a month, we had to stop.”

Despite China’s clampdown, Bitcoin has more than quadrupled since the start of 2023 to trade at around US$66,000 on June 16, helped in part by the US launch of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds in January.