A sudden, unannounced investigation has just landed.

According to Bloomberg, the United States has launched an in-depth national security review of Bitmain.

The operation is being carried out jointly by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Customs enforcement authorities, and the Department of Energy. Its codename is pointed: Operation Red Sunset.

The stated basis for the investigation is that the U.S. suspects Bitmain’s products may pose espionage risks and threaten U.S. national security. In particular, officials are concerned that the devices could be remotely controlled to gather intelligence or disrupt the U.S. power grid.

For the global crypto industry, this is a highly disruptive breaking event. The global battle over computing power has escalated sharply again. Is an industry shock coming?

Raid-Style Investigation

The investigation is more direct and more sweeping than outsiders expected.

U.S. law enforcement officers entered multiple mining farms, including in Texas, North Dakota, and Ohio, states with dense energy resources. Officers conducted physical inspections of equipment made by Bitmain.

The review covered:

1. Firmware versions and update records

2. Data transmission ports on control boards

3. Power management system logs

4. Factory serial numbers traced against actual power fluctuation data

This is the first time the U.S. has subjected crypto mining equipment to a teardown-style review approaching “military-grade” scrutiny.

More seriously, some mining rigs arriving at ports have been placed by customs on delayed-clearance lists, with only one stated reason: “additional national security verification required.”

A deeper layer of the investigation is taking place in laboratories. The U.S. has commissioned third-party security firms to reverse-engineer Bitmain’s new ASIC control boards, focusing on possible hidden ports and potential external command pathways. This kind of analysis is usually used for sensitive communications equipment.

The U.S. has handed reverse-engineering work on Bitmain’s new ASIC control boards to third-party security firms. The work focuses on finding possible hidden ports and potential external command pathways. Such reverse-engineering analysis is often used for sensitive communications equipment.

For the first time, the U.S. is treating mining rigs as “critical computing power terminals.”

Bitmain’s Response

Eight hours after the investigation was disclosed, Bitmain moved quickly to respond.

The company’s statement was unusually direct, stressing that its products have “absolutely no remote-control capability.”

The company listed three key points:

1. No hidden commands

2. The firmware architecture cannot support external start-stop control

3. All data transmission uses industry-standard protocols

Bitmain even proactively offered to give U.S. agencies source-code-level audit access.

That level of transparency is extremely rare among hardware companies.

At the same time, Bitmain is accelerating a restructuring of its supply chain. According to multiple sources, the company is moving ahead with efforts to strengthen contract manufacturing in Malaysia and Mexico. Some models have already entered the assessment stage for local assembly in the United States. The company also plans to release a dedicated firmware version aligned with U.S. “trusted hardware standards.”

This is a clear strategic adjustment.

Continued U.S. Investigations

As early as last year, the U.S. government placed China’s Xiamen Sophgo Technologies on the U.S. Commerce Department’s Entity List.

Sophgo is a company invested in by crypto company Bitmain. As of now, Bitmain chief Micree Zhan still indirectly owns about 22% of Sophgo through investment partnerships.

The episode stemmed from a U.S. Commerce Department investigation into TSMC in October 2024.

At the time, the Commerce Department suspected TSMC of providing chip manufacturing capacity to China’s Huawei, and Sophgo was suspected of acting as a middleman, or “white glove,” helping Huawei place orders with TSMC to secure capacity.

Although TSMC later stopped providing chip manufacturing services to Sophgo, the U.S. government appeared unsatisfied and decided to add the company to the Entity List.

At the request of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has since detained Bitmain Antminer S21 and T21 series mining rigs at ports across the country for as long as two months. The stated reason was that the detentions may be related to Xiamen Sophgo, a chip supplier under U.S. sanctions investigation.

Bitmain’s Antminer rivals, WhatsMiner and Avalon miners, have not been affected.

This year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided the Lonestar Dream bitcoin mining farm in Pyote, Texas, on September 29, focusing on an on-site ASIC repair center operated by ADW Tech, a Bitmain-linked company.

People at the site said about 12 to 13 people were taken away during the raid, most of them Chinese citizens with expired visas.

The enforcement action was related to the U.S. government’s recent scrutiny of ASIC mining rig imports. Relevant agencies are investigating whether Sophgo, a semiconductor company linked to Bitmain CEO Micree Zhan, may have violated export controls.

Public records show Sophgo was founded on April 18, 2019, with registered capital of 34.45 million yuan.

The company focuses on the development, promotion, and application of products including RISC-V and TPU processors. Sophgo has R&D centers in more than 10 Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Qingdao, as well as in countries including the United States and Singapore. R&D staff account for more than 73% of the company’s workforce, with master’s and doctoral degree holders making up more than 78% of that group.

Bitmain is the world’s largest mining rig manufacturer, accounting for 80% of global mining rig production. Bitmain’s high-end chips all come from TSMC, and Bitmain is also one of TSMC’s top 10 customers.

Sophgo and Bitmain have adjacent offices and share the same boss, Micree Zhan.

What the U.S. Is Really Worried About

There is a deeper meaning behind this U.S. action. According to people familiar with the matter, the investigation is mainly concerned with the potential security risks Bitmain may pose.

First, grid sensitivity. The U.S. Department of Energy has long worried that large mining farms could create load shocks for the power grid. If mining rigs could be remotely started or stopped, then, in its logic, that would amount to a system-level risk.

Second, computing power sovereignty. As AI, large-scale power dispatch, and industrial intelligence become part of a broader shift toward computing power across the economy, the U.S. is unwilling to remain highly dependent on China for the supply chain of critical computing nodes.

Third, the malleability of mining rigs as gray-area computing power. In theory, large-scale ASIC clusters can be redirected toward parallel computing, inference workloads, distributed network attacks, high-volume traffic forwarding, and other uses.

Mining rigs are no longer just “crypto mining tools.” They are dispatchable computing power units. The U.S. is unwilling to accept this kind of “incomplete controllability.”

What Is Unusual

Operation Red Sunset touches three sensitive points at once, which is the key reason it has shaken the industry.

First, the timing was abrupt. There were no hearings and no industry consultation. It looked more like an enforcement action than a regulatory process.

Second, the level of scrutiny is unprecedented. From mining farms to ports to laboratories, a single operation covered the entire supply chain.

Third, the suspicion itself cannot be disproven. The U.S. does not need to find a backdoor. It only needs to say: “We cannot confirm with 100% certainty that it does not exist.” Under a national security framework, “uncertainty” itself becomes a risk.

Deeper Meaning

Operation Red Sunset is not just an investigation. It looks more like a dividing line.

First, the hardware supply chain is being reframed through a defense lens. Any device capable of providing computing power may be treated as a strategic resource.

Second, blockchain computing power and AI computing power are being treated by the U.S. as the same kind of energy. The U.S. will not allow critical computing power nodes to circulate for long inside non-domestic supply chain systems.

Third, the boundaries of U.S.-China technology scrutiny have extended from software and platforms down to the hardware layer. Mining rigs are among the first devices to be pulled into this trend, but they will not be the last.

According to people inside Bitmain, the company is already preparing to build an Antminer assembly plant in Houston and has told suppliers it will move the vast majority of its China-based supply chain overseas to avoid the impact of steep U.S. government tariffs. From Binance, the world’s largest exchange, to Bitmain, the world’s largest mining rig maker, the U.S. government’s message appears to be: surrender or be destroyed.

Binance has already surrendered. Under sustained, high-intensity pressure from the U.S. government, it is unclear how long Bitmain can hold out. At this moment, the Chinese government cannot sit by as the U.S. government conducts sustained investigations and pressure campaigns against Bitmain, as it did with Binance by detaining and fining its founder. It needs to step forward and better protect high-end chip design companies such as Bitmain. It cannot allow the U.S. plot to succeed.

In a sense, this investigation is not aimed only at Bitmain.

It symbolizes a broader contest:

Whoever controls computing power will have a say in the future technological order. Operation Red Sunset is only the beginning. It marks the formal arrival of computing power equipment at the center of geopolitics. In the coming years, the nature of the global computing power supply chain will change.

It will no longer be defined only as a commercial chain. A new structure of strategic contest will become its new form.

Bitmain is on the front line not because of any mistake it has made, but because of its scale and its critical position. This geopolitical battle over computing power has only just begun.