The Great Migration of Bitcoin Mining: A Global Race to Switch Off and Relocate

Once, heavy industry chased labor and ports. Now, Bitcoin miners are chasing the electricity that the world has forgotten. This is a silent revolution—the machines hum loudly, ASIC chips operate tirelessly in warehouses, and miners’ eyes are already fixed on the cheapest, most wasted energy sources.

Electricity Becomes the New Factor of Production

The Industrial Revolution valued transportation and manpower, but Bitcoin rewrites the rules of the game. A mining operation requires extremely simple infrastructure: a warehouse, a few maintenance personnel, a humming array of mining machines, and a fiber optic connection. No bulky cargo needs to be shipped, no complex supply chains—only pure block rewards.

What does this mean? Miners can set up operations anywhere there is wasted electricity. Idle capacity that steel mills overlook is a gold mine for miners. When prices plummet or policy winds shift, they can enter quickly and exit just as fast.

Over the past five years, the speed of global hash rate movement has been astonishing. Hydropower during China’s rainy season was once a hotbed for mining; now, that advantage has shifted to the United States. According to the latest data, US mining pools now contribute over 41% of the total hash rate—an industry seismic shift is underway.

Wasted Energy Turns into a Miner’s Feast

The energy market has a hidden goldmine: wasted electricity. In 2023, California’s grid operator CAISO discarded 3.4 TWh of solar and wind energy, with an annual growth rate of 30%. By early 2024, another 2.4 TWh was wasted in just a few months. When electricity oversupply occurs, prices can even turn negative, forcing power generators to pay to consume electricity—that’s a huge irony.

But miners have sniffed out the opportunity. Riot Platforms received $71 million in electricity subsidies in Texas last year—an amount that exceeded the market value of the Bitcoin they mined. By 2025, the company had already received $46 million in subsidies in just a few months. They cleverly turn the grid’s pain points into profit machines.

From Waste to Green Computing Power

A new trend is emerging. Soluna installs modular data centers directly at wind farms, while Crusoe in Texas consumes natural gas that would otherwise be flared—gas that would have been directly released into the atmosphere.

Heat recovery technology is also being piloted. Marathon Digital, in a project in Finland, transports the excess heat generated by mining machines to regional heating systems. Some areas in Norway even use the heat from mining rigs to dry seaweed—an exemplary case of turning waste into treasure.

Grid operators are gradually realizing a new possibility: flexible mining loads like Lancium, capable of immediate shutdown during extreme weather, can act as virtual batteries.

The Global Mining Map Is Being Rewritten

Bhutan’s partnership with Bitdeer will utilize 100 MW of hydropower for mining infrastructure—a bold attempt by a country to support the cryptocurrency industry with clean energy. Kentucky in the US has canceled sales tax on crypto mining electricity, while El Salvador is ambitiously planning a Bitcoin industrial base powered by volcano geothermal energy.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is also eyeing the computing power market. But the differences are stark: AI data centers fear downtime and require ultra-low latency, thus being confined to cities. Bitcoin miners, on the other hand, famously shout, “Downtime? What’s that?”—it is this tolerance that allows them to establish empires in any frontier area with cheap electricity.

Birth of the Frontier of Hash Rate

Observers have noticed a emerging geographical phenomenon: hash rate clusters are continuously emerging in areas with the most severe electricity waste, well-developed fiber infrastructure, and the most friendly policies. Industry analysts even make bold predictions: by 2035, city skylines may undergo a fundamental transformation—becoming a combination of substations and 24-hour cafes, while true economic vitality shifts to rural data centers.

The global migration of Bitcoin mining signals the dawn of a new era—electricity has replaced labor as the primary factor of production, and hash rate has surpassed ports as strategic hubs. Machines hum loudly, chasing wasted electrons, and boundaries are being redefined. This is a wild and endless energy race.