Bitcoin mining rigs pop up in Southeast Asia’s abandoned malls, factories after China crackdown

The 6.87-hectare (17-acre) cement slab in the middle of a Borneo industrial area once belonged to a logging company. Long ago that business abandoned the site to the elements, leaving just rudimentary structures and a four-storey-tall concrete birdhouse made to lure swiftlets whose nests, built with saliva, fetch high prices in China.

But in 2023, another industry moved in: bitcoin miners. Sheltered by a vast, sheet-metal roof, over 1,000 machines now roar away, while hundreds more sit nearby in cardboard boxes waiting to be unpacked.

The site in Tanjung Manis, Sarawak, is the largest of four operations in the area run by miner Bityou. Owner Peter Lim chose the location after he was forced to close a larger 10,000 rig, 20-megawatt operation in China, following a ban on bitcoin miners in 2021. “Most of the companies already left this industrial park,” said Lim. “We decided, why don’t we make use of these abandoned resources?”

He’s one of many miners popping up in Southeast Asia – not all of them entirely legal, although Lim says Bityou’s operations are above board – after China’s crackdown. China was once the dominant country for bitcoin mining, the process of using computing power to solve encryption puzzles in return for new tokens. In 2019, it accounted for about three-quarters of global activity, according to data collected by Cambridge University.

But when the Chinese authorities declared that any cryptocurrency-related transactions would be considered illicit financial activity, the industry was decimated.

“Back then, some of the state governments, they just seize your property,” said Alex Loh, Lim’s colleague at Bityou, in an interview.

Loh said some 3,000 of his machines were seized at a mine he used to run in Inner