Joe Biden orders Chinese cryptominer to sell land near US military base

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The White House has ordered a Chinese group that runs a crypto-mining operation in Wyoming to sell the land where it keeps its servers because the facility is next to a base that houses US nuclear ballistic missiles.

President Joe Biden ordered MineOne Partners and its partners to sell the land next to Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming within 120 days. The White House said the company, a British Virgin Island group majority owned by Chinese nationals, had not informed the US government about the sensitive transaction.

Warren AFB is one of the locations where the US deploys nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles. In an order requiring the divestiture, Biden said MineOne used specialised equipment for cryptocurrency mining that included foreign-sourced technology that posed a national security risk to the US.

He said: “The proximity of the foreign-owned real estate to a strategic missile base and key element of America’s nuclear triad, and the presence of specialised and foreign-sourced equipment potentially capable of facilitating surveillance and espionage activities, presents a national security risk to the US.”