Examining Biden's Chip Ban

Automatic TRANSCRIPT
Let's kick it off with some Biden chip band, give me the lay of the land for this story. Definitely important for a lot of people in electronic space. Yeah, I think the Biden administration part of their strategy is they want to keep their semiconductors at home. So this story essentially came out to where they unveiled part of their strategy and the key points are that they kind of want the semiconductor industry workers to come home that are currently working in China. And then they don't want to send the cutting edge chips, those 5 nanometer 7 nanometer chips over to China. And so if you think about impact on the Bitcoin mining space, it could be that manufacturers in China can't get their chips and maybe produce as much. But I know you have some color on this one, so I'm going to send it back over to you. Yeah, first seeing a story you're like, oh, this is not good for the asic industry because a lot of asic manufacturers were formerly very centralized in China, but luckily it has changed over the last two years, pretty drastically. So we have bitmain and we have micro BT, those make up probably 90% of the asic marketplace, maybe even a little bit more. And both of those teams work through different foundries to procure their chips, notably TSMC, which is based out of Taiwan with bitmain, and then Samsung for micro BT, which is located in South Korea. A lot of the machines were then assembled in China, especially in Shanghai and those sort of areas. But it's not really the case anymore. Luckily bit main and micro BT really saw through this a while ago, made some strategic moves. A lot of both their operations are actually now based in Malaysia and Indonesia. A few other locations in Southeast Asia. That's where they're putting these machines together. So if you get an asic nowadays, that's commonly where it's manufactured.