How Trump’s Tariffs Could Affect U.S. Bitcoin Miners

President Donald Trump said at a 2024 campaign event that he wanted all remaining bitcoin, about 1.15 million units out of the original 21 million supply, to be mined in America. While this pledge was impractical, as well as counterproductive to Bitcoin’s decentralized ethos, the message was clear: the U.S. was going all in on bitcoin mining. 

Fast forward to April 2025 and this pledge seems downright silly. As a result of his unprecedented policy of so-called “reciprocal tariffs” against virtually every American trading partner around the globe, Trump’s administration landed a gut punch on the beleaguered industry. 

Now the miners, who import hundreds of millions of dollars of machines from countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia, are facing 24-46% tariffs on these deliveries. 

And this news could not have come at a worse time. Hashprice, a term used to assess mining profitability — or the amount of bitcoin earned from a unit of energy — continues to set all-time lows as competition rises, but the payoff in terms of new bitcoin stagnates as its price flounders amid the global macro rollback. As of this writing bitcoin is priced at $84,536, 22% down from its all-time high above $108,786 in January 2025.

These circumstances leave American miners with a difficult decision. (According to multiple sources, they comprise about 40% of the total global hashrate, or mining power, on the Bitcoin network.) Should they import machines and pay the excessive tariffs in order to maintain hashrate parity with the global network, or let them sit unplugged in Asian warehouses?

“I’m seeing a lot of confusion from everybody, even at the highest levels. No one really knows what’s going on,” says Taras Kulyk, CEO of Synteq Digital, an official distributor for Bitmain, the world’s largest bitcoin miner manufacturer. “No one really understands what — for the lack of a better term — ‘strategy’ is being implemented right now. It seems like chaos, not even controlled or organized chaos. No 5D chess anymore. It just seems like complete, ridiculous chaos.”

Miners’ Recent Battle Scars

If there is any silver lining for bitcoin miners, it is that overcoming a number of challenges in recent years has strengthened them. After being given a gift from the Chinese government in May 2021, when it kicked all miners out of the country, leading to a 42% drop in hashrate, bitcoin miners have faced an onslaught of challenges.

The first came from a suite of bitcoin-proxy substitutes that suddenly became competitors for investor dollars. Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, became a spirit animal for the bitcoin industry when it spearheaded a bitcoin accumulation strategy as a corporate mantra in 2020. The company currently owns 528,185 bitcoin, worth $44.8 billion, and is sitting on a paper gain of $9 billion. Its stock more than quadrupled in 2024.

A rash of copycat firms like Semler Scientific, Metaplanet, and Genius Group have all followed suit. And they are able to fund most of these purchases through at-the-market stock offerings or zero-coupon convertible debt, meaning that investors are lending billions of dollars at zero interest to these companies so that they can buy bitcoin right now. This strategy stands in stark relief to bitcoin miners who have to pay massive upfront costs to purchase miners, power generation, facilities, and address various overhead costs. All for a payoff that needs to be projected out 12-24 months in the future. 

Adding insult to injury, many miners had to sell newly minted bitcoin and bitcoin held on their balance sheet during the bear market of 2022 and early 2023 to maintain operations. This means that they were unable to reap the subsequent gains in bitcoin’s jump above $100,000 for those tokens.

The second hit came from the launch of spot bitcoin ETFs in January 2024, led by the likes of BlackRock and Fidelity, which have accumulated more than $100 billion worth of bitcoin themselves. All of this meant that public bitcoin mining stocks suddenly had competition for investors that wanted exposure to bitcoin, as well as leveraged or high-beta exposure, after operating as an oligopoly for years.

Miners at a Crossroads

Then came the artificial intelligence or high-performance computing (HPC) craze of the past two years. Suddenly miners were faced with another key decision — should they focus on mining or pivot to this hot industry? The choice was not as simple as it sounds, as the servers needed to mine bitcoin are very different from running large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. However, the hosting sites could have dual-use functions. Many companies made overtures to the HPC industry, but a lot of it was just marketing fluff, at least for now. The only bitcoin miner to earn significant revenue from serving HPC clients is Core Scientific. 

Turning to HPC could boost share price in the short-term, but it also means that miners miss out on the future gains from mined bitcoin. It also exposed them to the type of massive reversal in fortunes that came when Chinese competitor DeepSeek shocked the entire market with a low-cost LLM competitor. 

All of this uncertainty, combined with the recent market rout, has led to bitcoin miners being punished by investors this year. Many of the top miners have lost more than 50% of their market capitalization in 2025.

Holding Their Breath

In speaking with multiple miners for this story, many are focusing on improving the efficiency of operations and holding off on major decisions until more tariff clarity comes. The mantra is controlling what they can control. The good news is that most major miners are well situated to ride out the next few months and see what happens when Trump’s 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs expires on July 9, even if at times this has meant incurring extra costs to maintain hashrate growth expectations. 

Lauren Lim, head of hardware at ASIC broker Luxor Technologies, said in an interview that most miners have been content to pay the flat 10% tariff placed on orders being imported from Southeast Asia. “We saw miners just eating the 10% cost. Originally they were already paying around 3% from Malaysia [as an example], so paying 7% more is still affordable, relatively speaking.”

But the costs are not limited to tariffs. There is a rush for anyone importing goods to the U.S. before the July 9 deadline, so shipping costs have surged. “I’m aware that some of our largest partners we’ve worked with took a massive hit to bring in hardware in advance of the April 9th deadline [when the reciprocal tariffs were supposed to go into effect],” said Kulyk. “They spent tens of millions of dollars to do so, only to see Trump give the extension and then provide the exemptions for everything.”

In an interview, mining analyst Wolfie Zhao said, “The impact appears limited for most Tier 1 miners like Riot, CleanSpark, and Iris Energy. These companies either paused hashrate expansion or received their major shipments ahead of schedule.” Not everyone may fare as well, he said. “However, others such as Cipher Mining and Hut 8 may be more exposed. Cipher has a pending Q2 shipment of Bitmain’s S21 XP series, and Hut 8 has disclosed multiple Bitmain purchase agreements since late 2024 that may still be in fulfillment.”

Zhao also points out that at today’s prices, which are still up 37% over the past 12 months, miners are still profitability producing bitcoin and they are not in danger of having to liquidate further assets to pay off debt or massively subsidize operations. “Generally, we’re not seeing major signs of distress. Bitcoin’s current price remains well above the levels that would force broad balance sheet strain, and most miners have learned from the 2021 cycle not to overleverage.” 

But regardless, miners are already adapting so that they are not completely beholden to Trump’s tariff whims. Miners with facilities around the world with excess capacity are already planning to re-route machines to those locations so as to avoid the U.S. tariffs. “In the third and fourth quarter of last year, we took a lot of machines that were in the U.S. sites and moved them to Ethiopia because the cost differential was pretty significant,” says Charley Brady, head of investor relations at publicly traded bitcoin miner Bitfufu. Moving forward, Brady says that the company will be prioritizing expansion overseas, such as a further move into Ethiopia to take over existing sites or build new ones, along with exploring opportunities in the U.S. 

Jeff LeBerge, head of capital markets and strategic initiatives at Bitdeer, was even more explicit in an interview with Unchained: “We have capacity in Texas that we are looking to fill, but we also have capacity in Norway and Bhutan, which is where the majority of our new capacity is coming online this year. So we were able to redirect some of the rigs from Texas. Now we’re going to prioritize Norway and Bhutan until we have more clarity on the tariff situation.” 

Uncle Sam Likely to Come Up Short

But it is clear that any expectations for U.S. bitcoin miners to reduce dependence on foreign manufacturing, like the two above exceptions, are likely misplaced. MicroBT, the other member of the Chinese mining duopoly, has been manufacturing machines in the U.S. for about three years. But it can only make about 5,000 units a month in the U.S. Bitmain has three facilities in America, and publicly listed Canaan also produces some machines in the country. Lim from Luxor estimates that as much as 15,000 units in total can be produced each month in the U.S. by these three companies. There are some smaller, but growing domestic manufacturers, such as Bitdeer and Auradine, that are ramping up production. 

But Lim says that all of this equates to less than 10% of global monthly production. And things get even more complicated from there because rapidly boosting production can be much more difficult than it sounds.

“I actually wouldn’t expect a huge increase in the quantity being made in the U.S. because the cost to produce here is very high,” she says. “The speed of production is also not as fast as non-U.S. based factories.” Lim also pointed out that it might be difficult for some of these companies to sell what they are already making in the country, as the types of devices that can be produced in those factories do not necessarily match up with what miners are looking to order.

‘A Chilling Effect’ or a Carveout?

All of this means that by sometime this summer, especially if the reciprocal tariffs are not further delayed, these companies will have to make some key decisions. 

Put more simply, they will need to decide if the U.S. is a safe place to make nine-figure investments given this regulatory uncertainty. And the trend may not be apparent right away. “Capital that is committed to existing projects [in the U.S.] that have already been ground broken, will not stop,” says Kulyk. “Those will get developed and you’ll probably see growth for the next, call it six to nine, twelve, eighteen months. It’s the new projects breaking ground, allocating new development and capacity — I think that’s where we’re going to see a major chilling effect.” 

The one potential source of relief could be the fact that the Trump family now has direct skin in the bitcoin mining game through a partnership with another firm, Hut8, to launch a new company called American Bitcoin. Even with close ties to the administration, the company cannot avoid the economic costs of these tariffs, so perhaps that could lead to a special carveout for the industry.