Japan's GMO Internet says it will stop making and selling cryptocurrency miners, but will continue its in-house cryptocurrency mining operations for now
Yogita Khatri / CoinDesk :
Context & Ripple Effects
GMO entered mining at the top of the market: in December 2017 it opened its first crypto-mining facility in Northern Europe, explicitly stepping into a field dominated by Chinese players. One year later it is keeping the facility but exiting the hardware side — halting manufacture and sale of miners while continuing to mine in-house 'for now.'
The retreat lands mid-shakeout: Japan's FSA had already been pressuring exchanges to delist coins favored by criminals, and the venture behind the Kodak-branded CES mining rig dissolved within months of its debut. Selling mining hardware to customers was proving the weakest link in the mining stack.
First-order effects
- GMO's would-be mining customers lose one of the few non-Chinese rig suppliers, while the company itself keeps bearing power and operating costs at its Northern Europe facility without hardware revenue alongside.
- The move mirrors the fate of the Kodak-branded rig venture, confirming that press-demo miner hardware rarely converts into a sustainable product business.
Second-order effects
- With a Japanese manufacturer out of the rig market, hardware sales consolidate further toward the Chinese-dominated suppliers GMO flagged when it entered the field.
- Running in-house mining without a hardware arm leaves GMO fully exposed to hash-price swings — the same exposure that pushed many GPU miners to shut off rigs once GPU-based mining turned unprofitable after Ethereum's Merge.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward mining consolidating around operators who run their own facilities rather than sell boxes — a mining-to-infrastructure conversion in which the durable asset is the site and power contract, not the product line.
- Japan's industrial-chip attention has since shifted elsewhere, including expanded export controls on advanced chips and lithography equipment, leaving consumer crypto hardware with little policy or capital tailwind.
The trend: Crypto-mining hardware ventures are unwinding across the industry, leaving self-operated mining facilities as the durable model while capital and policy attention migrate to AI compute.