The White House announced on Monday that it had banned the sale to a Chinese company specialized in cryptocurrency “mining” of land located less than two kilometers from a military nuclear site for reasons of national security.
Washington relied on a 1950 law intended to protect sensitive sites to prohibit the acquisition of land rights by the company MineOne Partners near the city of Cheyenne, in Wyoming (northwest). The company wanted to set up a cryptocurrency mining site there, an operation that consists of carrying out a large series of calculations that result in the production of a unit of cryptocurrency, calculations that require significant computing power and, therefore, numerous servers.
But the coveted land is near Francis Warren Air Force Base, which is home to part of America’s nuclear missile launch sites. Therefore, the transaction would represent a “threat to harm the national security of the United States,” the White House justified in a press release.
“Significant risk to national security”
The decision comes after a report from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (or CFIUS in English), which estimates that the risk comes from both the proximity to the air base and the presence, for mining, of computer equipment.
“The proximity of a foreign cryptocurrency mining company to a strategic missile site, a key element of the US nuclear force, represents a significant risk to national security that led CFIUS to inform” the transaction to the White House, he justified. the Treasury Department in a statement. separate press release.
The Treasury specifies that in normal times recommendations can be sent to buyers to “reduce risks to national security”, but that these recommendations were “neither adequate nor appropriate” in this scenario.
Source: BFM TV
