Bitmain, a manufacturer of ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) mining equipment, announced a 20% increase in the price of its products. The increase would occur from 2022, and its main reason is the increase in the components used to manufacture the chips of the equipment to mine bitcoin (BTC).
According to what reports Jic News, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is going to increase the prices of the components used in the elaboration of integrated circuits, which are the essence of the equipment bitcoin mining. This increase, which occurs in a context of chip shortages worldwide, will be applied from the first quarter of next year.
There will be two scales in these increases. The first, for advanced processors like 7 nanometer (nm) chips, will be 10%. Meanwhile, for 16 nm chips, a slightly more consolidated technology with several years of support, prices will rise between 10 and 20%.
This, according to the cited source, could have an effect on Bitmain’s AntMiner computers. In fact, a post from the HashRate Index site details that these Bitmain products already had increases of between 10 and 17% during the month of July. The exception was the AntMiner S9 device, the cheapest on the list, whose value fell by 3.2%.
Another model whose price has risen is the S19j Pro 2022, whose orders for the first half of 2022 were quickly sold out in August, according to an official company statement.
Other factors affecting bitcoin mining
Beyond these issues related purely to the mining industry, there are also other issues that may affect the demand for this equipment and, therefore, its price.
One one of them has to do with the Chinese government’s bans on cryptocurrency mining in several of its provinces, which CriptoNoticias has reported throughout the year. As a consequence of these measures, many miners were forced to leave that country to settle in other latitudes. This generated the sale of many equipment in secondary markets, even at lower prices than the official ones.
Likewise, and also related to the above, the fall in the value of the The main cryptocurrency seems to have played a role as well. As reflected in the graph below, the value of mining equipment rose with the pace of the cryptocurrency, but also fell in a similar way.
However, the cited reports indicate that overselling from China “has cooled off” and that the acquisition of Mining in the United States and Canada has contributed to the rebound in prices. These North American miners seem to intend to take over the leadership left by the Chinese miners, at least until they manage to relocate and resume their activities.
