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.