BIT Digital is migrating 14,500 bitcoin miners to the US amid China crackdown

Nasdaq-listed BIT Digital is migrating 14,500 bitcoin ASIC miners from China to the U.S. after China's crackdown on the bitcoin mining space.

The firm said in an update on Thursday that following regulatory changes in China, it suspended operations there on June 21 and has accelerated its migration to North America that already begun in October last year.

As of the beginning of May, a majority of BIT Digital's mining operations was still located in China, which dropped the regulatory hammer early June.

BIT Digital is the latest publicly listed bitcoin mining firm with operations in China that is migrating its equipment overseas, after BIT Mining and The9 City.

BIT Digital still had about 9,500 bitcoin miners inside China as of June 30. But it said it expects to complete the migration of its "remaining China-based fleet during the third quarter of 2021."

Based on the Thursday update, it appears BIT Digital has also liquidated about one third of its equipment in China during Q2.

Per its May update, BIT Digital had a fleet of "43,606 miners with a total maximum hash rate of 2,423.15 PH/s [petahashes per second]" as of April 30. About 80% of the equipment was in China at the time, with 19,060 miners in Sichuan, 12,830 units in Xinjiang and 3,200 units in Yunnan. 

BIT Digital said over Q2, it sold about 11,000 units of bitcoin miners that it deemed to "have a lower expected return on invested capital ... and/or were deemed unsuitable for long-distance migration to North America."

BIT Digital hosts its U.S. equipment in facilities owned by colocation provider Compute North, which plans to scale up its hosting capacity significantly over the next 12 months.

BIT Digital's mining fleet breakdown by geography