Samsung confirms it is manufacturing ASIC chips, which are used to mine cryptocurrencies; the ASIC industry is dominated by China's Bitmain and Canaan Creative
Fresh from toppling Intel as the planet's biggest seller of chipsets, Samsung has confirmed that it has begun manufacturing ASIC chips …
Context & Ripple Effects
Samsung's confirmation that it manufactures cryptocurrency-mining ASIC chips lands weeks after it overtook Intel as the world's largest chipset seller, and it puts the Korean giant directly against the duopoly profiled in Quartz's Bitmain deep-dive — a company that controlled roughly 29% of Bitcoin's hash rate and was already signaling an expansion into deep-learning silicon.
The move also prefigures a pattern the corpus keeps returning to: four years later Intel would launch its own blockchain accelerator push through a Custom Compute Group with named mining customers, and by 2025 the Chinese rig makers themselves were relocating assembly toward the US as tariffs reshaped the supply chain.
First-order effects
- Bitmain and Canaan Creative, which dominate the ASIC industry, now compete against a vertically integrated manufacturer that controls its own memory, foundry, and packaging lines rather than renting them.
- Cryptocurrency miners gain a second sourcing option outside the Chinese ASIC vendors, reducing their dependence on a single supplier ecosystem.
Second-order effects
- Intel's later entry into blockchain accelerators — shipping chips to customers including Block, Argo, and Griid — shows the competitive response this invites: general-purpose chipmakers treating mining silicon as a designable product line rather than ceding it to specialists.
- Samsung's foundry utilization from crypto orders adds volume that supports its broader advanced-node ambitions, foreshadowing the surge in production requests from BYD, Google, AMD, and Tesla that sources report as AI demand strains TSMC's capacity.
Third-order effects
- If big integrated manufacturers keep absorbing workloads once owned by specialist ASIC vendors, the industry drifts toward workload-specific silicon designed and fabricated by a handful of scale players — a structure where Bitmain-style dominance depends on staying ahead of the foundries' own design arms.
- Geography compounds the shift: with Bitmain, Canaan, and MicroBT building over 90% of mining rigs but establishing US manufacturing footholds under tariff pressure, ASIC supply chains are being regionalized even as design power consolidates.
The trend: Specialized compute markets are being pulled into the orbit of full-stack chip manufacturers, as Samsung's ASIC entry, Intel's blockchain group, and the rig makers' supply-chain relocation each show.