Biden orders MineOne to divest crypto-mining site near Wyoming missile base

A presidential order reaches crypto mining

On May 13, 2024, President Joe Biden ordered MineOne Partners Limited and three related entities to unwind their acquisition of a cryptocurrency-mining property near Francis E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The order prohibited the transaction, required the purchasers and affiliates to divest every direct and indirect interest in the real estate within 120 calendar days, and imposed a separate 90-day deadline for removing purchaser-installed equipment and post-acquisition improvements. Both deadlines could be extended by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS.

The property was not an abstract digital asset. The presidential record identifies 12.06 acres at 635 Logistics Drive, within one mile of Warren Air Force Base. MineOne Partners was described as a British Virgin Islands company ultimately majority-owned by Chinese nationals; the named purchasers also included MineOne Cloud Computing Investment I L.P., MineOne Data Center LLC and MineOne Wyoming Data Center LLC. That combination of foreign ownership, sensitive real estate and specialized computing hardware put a crypto business inside the national-security review system.

What the government established—and what it did not

The order says MineOne acquired the property in June 2022 and improved it for specialized cryptocurrency-mining operations. It also says the transaction was not filed with CFIUS until the committee’s non-notified transaction team investigated after a public tip. Under the president’s formal finding, there was credible evidence that the purchasers, through the acquisition, might take action threatening to impair U.S. national security.

CFIUS identified two connected risks: the site’s proximity to a strategic missile base that hosts Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, and specialized mining equipment on the property, some of it foreign-sourced. The order and Treasury’s May 13 statement described equipment potentially capable of facilitating surveillance and espionage. That is a government risk finding, not proof disclosed in the public record that the equipment had conducted espionage. Neither document published a hardware inventory, technical test, intelligence assessment, mining-output figure or on-chain evidence.

Treasury said CFIUS concluded that a negotiated mitigation agreement could not address the risks in an effective, verifiable and monitorable way, leading the committee to refer the case to the president. The order therefore went beyond a fine or a prospective licensing condition: it compelled an already-completed property acquisition to be unwound.

The immediate obligations

MineOne and its affiliates were ordered to refrain immediately from physical or logical access to the property, equipment and improvements, except access CFIUS deemed necessary to carry out the divestment and removals. They had seven calendar days to establish controls preventing prohibited access. The order also required weekly compliance certifications, gave CFIUS inspection and audit authority, and barred a transfer to a proposed buyer unless MineOne notified CFIUS and the committee allowed 10 business days to consider an objection.

Those terms made the development consequential for the mining industry without turning it into a general prohibition on cryptocurrency mining. The legal focus was a covered real-estate transaction and a specific national-security risk. The order did not classify any token, change Bitcoin’s protocol, establish a nationwide mining rule or make a claim about cryptocurrency prices.

Significance and limits on May 13

The case showed that a mining site could be scrutinized as physical critical infrastructure: land, utility improvements, networked computers and foreign ownership mattered more to the decision than the market value of the assets being mined. It also demonstrated the reach of CFIUS’s process for transactions that had already closed and had not initially entered its review channel.

No reliable evidence in the cited May 13 records establishes that the order caused a move in bitcoin or any other cryptoasset, so this reconstruction makes no price, return, volume or causal market claim. The Associated Press reported on May 13 that a company representative did not respond to its request for comment. The event-date public record therefore contained the government’s findings but no substantive MineOne rebuttal. The unresolved questions were whether CFIUS would extend either deadline, how compliance would be verified, and who, if anyone, could acquire the property without renewing the identified risk.