At the end of 2025, with Bitcoin back above $90,000 and network-wide computing power becoming brutally competitive, Bitdeer quietly made a major move in Nevada: it leased a factory of about 188,000 square feet.

According to a Friday announcement from Dermody, this is no ordinary mining farm. It is Bitdeer’s flagship base for large-scale U.S. production of SEALMINER mining rigs.

The Nasdaq market reacted plainly to the news: the stock rose.

But if you focus only on those few percentage points of gains, or treat this as a routine capacity expansion, you are underestimating Jihan Wu’s strategy.

From Crypto Mining to Mining Rig Manufacturing

Plenty of mining companies have expanded overseas in recent years, but Bitdeer is among the first to pursue mining rig manufacturing at scale on U.S. soil.

The site is in Sparks, Nevada, next to Reno. The area is already home to Tesla’s Gigafactory, and now it will also host Bitdeer’s SEALMINER production line.

The move sends a clear signal: competition in crypto mining has evolved from simply “grabbing power and buying machines” into vertical integration and in-house development of core technologies.

Guo Haiyan, CEO of Bitdeer Industrial, put it plainly: the goal is to strengthen the local U.S. computing power hardware ecosystem.

In plain English, that means Bitdeer cannot keep relying on other people’s machines. In an era when computing power is power, if you do not control the core hardware, namely the ASIC chip, you remain a high-end laborer working for TSMC or Bitmain.

SEAL04’s Delay and High-Stakes Bet

But business is never smooth sailing. Even as the Nevada factory made a high-profile debut, Bitdeer also acknowledged a slightly awkward fact: its next-generation chip, SEAL04, has run into trouble.

SEAL04 is the blockbuster product in Bitdeer’s self-developed mining rig chip roadmap, and it is also the chip generation into which Jihan Wu has poured the most effort in computing power hardware, while drawing the most controversy.

The design, once seen as highly promising, failed to meet expected performance targets, forcing a delay in the R&D schedule.

At the same time, a class-action lawsuit has emerged in the secondary market, accusing the company of misleading investors about its production timeline. This “between the sea and a powder keg” situation is exactly what technology R&D often looks like in practice.

SEAL04 is aiming for extreme energy efficiency, at around 5 J/TH, which is close to the industry ceiling.

Bitdeer chose not to push ahead regardless. Instead, it went back to the drawing board and began parallel development of two chip versions.

This patchwork approach may make the financial statements look worse in the short term, but for a player that wants to build a long-term position in hardware, admitting failure is more credible than hiding flaws.

AI’s Shadow, Mining Rigs’ Fate

More interestingly, Bitcoin is no longer Bitdeer’s only card.

Look through its recent financial reports and updates, and you will find that “AI” now appears almost as often as “Bitcoin.”

The company is building AI data centers in Malaysia, leasing NVIDIA GB200 systems, and has already reached $8 million in annualized AI cloud revenue.

This reveals a truth about today’s computing power market: computing power itself does not care about status.

In the past, miners were dismissed as “electricity rats.” But as the AI wave arrived, mining companies with large power allocations and experience running industrial-scale operations suddenly became highly sought-after assets.

Bitdeer’s Nevada factory appears on the surface to be about building mining rigs. In reality, it is refining a full-chain computing services capability. Whether the task is crypto mining or AI, the underlying logic is the same: how to turn cheaper energy into denser computational output.

Computing Power’s “New Cold War” and the Return of Sovereignty

To understand Bitdeer’s move, we have to look beyond crypto. In today’s macro environment, chips and computing power have become central to geopolitical competition.

A company with Singapore roots choosing to build a flagship hardware manufacturing base in the United States is not only about avoiding tariffs or supply chain risk. It looks more like a deep, compliance-driven push into “computing power sovereignty.”

In the past, mining rigs followed a model of “made in China, mined globally.”

Now, the model has shifted to “self-developed chips, U.S. manufacturing, global deployment.”

That shift in identity is meant to secure a long-term ticket in future regulatory battles.

Jihan Wu understands better than most that cryptocurrency’s decentralization is an ideal, but the infrastructure of computing power is bound to move toward centralized industrial scale.

From that huge factory in Nevada, what flows out in the future will not just be sealed SEALMINER units, but Jihan Wu’s ambition for the computing power landscape of the next decade.

Yes, chip development has been delayed, and yes, the company is facing lawsuits. But these are the trials that hard-tech startups inevitably go through.

Compared with the “PPT mining companies” that only know how to chant slogans in a bull market, Bitdeer, which is willing to plant factories in the desert and dig into the lowest layers of chip R&D, is clearly a more interesting company to watch.

The next era of computing power dominance may not be born in the candlestick charts of crypto exchanges, but inside these humming factories and R&D labs lit late into the night.

This is not just a story about crypto mining. It is a major migration in computing civilization.