Bitdeer Acquires Bitcoin ASIC Designer for $140 Million

Jihan Wu’s bitcoin mining and cloud mining giant Bitdeer is acquiring a fabless bitcoin mining chip designer in an all-stock deal valued at $140 million.

Bitdeer said on Thursday that it has entered into a share purchase agreement with FreeChain Inc., known as DesiweMiner, to acquire all of its issued and outstanding shares for a consideration of 20 million Class A shares of Bitdeer (BTDR).

Based on BTDR’s closing price of $7 as of Wednesday, the transaction is valued at $140 million, which comes just days after Bitdeer announced the raise of $100 million from Tether in a private placement.

The deal also comes as Bitdeer plans to roll out its first bitcoin ASIC miner after the launch of the first generation of its proprietary ASIC chip. Bitdeer said that after a ten-month due diligence period, it believed that DesiweMiner’s chip designs are “highly complementary” to Bitdeer’s chips and “are ideally suited for advanced semiconductor processes at 4nm and below.”

According to DesiweMiner’s website, its latest generation of equipment, the K10 Ultra, has a hashrate of 170 TH/s with an efficiency of 20.5 J/TH. Bitdeer’s chief business officer Linghui Kong said that DesiweMiner has about 30,000 “high-performance machines” in the market.

Bitdeer said that following the acquisition, the Desiweminer team will join Bitdeer’s ASIC design team in Singapore to accelerate the time to market for its SEALMINER series.