State Grid Ordered June 19 Power Suspension at BIT Mining’s Ganzi Center

BIT Mining’s indirectly held Ganzi Changhe Hydropower Consumption Service data center received notice on June 19, 2021 that its electricity supply would be suspended at 9:00 p.m. Beijing time that evening, according to the New York-listed company’s subsequent disclosure.

The notice came from State Grid Sichuan Ganzi Electric Power Co. and gave the provincial cryptocurrency-mining crackdown a specific operator, facility and effective time. BIT Mining disclosed the event publicly on June 21, saying Ganzi Changhe had since suspended operations.

That chronology requires care. The power notice and stated effective time belong to June 19. The company’s public announcement came two days later. The surviving record does not establish the precise minute when the facility’s machines stopped computing, how much electrical load was disconnected or how much Bitcoin hash rate disappeared with it.

A provincial order reached a named facility

Sichuan’s Development and Reform Commission and Energy Bureau had issued a joint directive dated June 18. Contemporaneous Reuters reporting said it identified 26 suspected cryptocurrency-mining projects for closure by June 20, ordered state electricity companies to stop serving detected mining operations and required local governments to search for additional projects.

A later response from the Sichuan office of China’s National Energy Administration confirmed that the June 18 action instructed generators to inspect their customers and immediately stop supplying electricity to virtual-currency mining. The regulator described the work as implementing the national Financial Stability and Development Committee’s May 21 call to suppress bitcoin mining and trading.

Ganzi Changhe’s notice therefore was not an isolated commercial outage. It was a documented instance of the policy passing through the power system to an identified industrial customer.

The distinction mattered because Sichuan was associated with seasonal hydroelectric mining. Miners moved computing equipment toward the province during wet periods to use abundant power. Reuters, relying on University of Cambridge research available at the time, described Sichuan as China’s second-largest bitcoin-mining province. Enforcement there showed that hydroelectric supply did not exempt a facility from the national campaign.

What BIT Mining disclosed

BIT Mining said its Sichuan data centers, including Ganzi Changhe, contributed approximately 3% of company revenue in May 2021. That was a company-supplied, one-month estimate—not a measure of the facility’s share of Bitcoin’s network, Chinese mining capacity or global cryptocurrency production.

The June 21 announcement paired the shutdown disclosure with BIT Mining’s delivery of 320 mining machines to Kazakhstan. The company assigned that shipment a theoretical maximum capacity of 18.2 petahashes per second and said another 2,600 machines, with 102.3 petahashes per second of theoretical maximum capacity, were expected to reach Kazakhstan before July 1.

Those shipment figures did not prove that equipment removed from Ganzi Changhe had already resumed mining abroad. BIT Mining said the first batch was expected to enter operation by June 27, making deployment prospective on June 19. The figures described theoretical capacity, not observed output or uptime.

Institutionally, the episode demonstrated how quickly geographic concentration could become operating risk. Bitcoin’s protocol remained available, but an electricity supplier acting under provincial direction could remove a commercial data center’s computing capacity on short notice. Restoring that capacity elsewhere required transportation, installation, power contracts and functioning host infrastructure.

Later filing context

BIT Mining’s 2021 annual report, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2022, confirmed the June 19 notice and same-day effective suspension of power. It later quantified Sichuan operations, including Ganzi Changhe, at approximately $11.4 million, or 2.6% of second-quarter 2021 revenue.

The annual report also said Ganzi Changhe and the company’s other Sichuan data centers had suspended operations since June 21. That wording is not precise enough to establish whether Ganzi’s operating halt began exactly at 9:00 p.m. on June 19 or was grouped with the wider June 21 shutdown. The strongest event-date conclusion is narrower: a named BIT Mining facility received a same-day power-suspension notice on June 19, providing direct corporate evidence that Sichuan’s crackdown had reached operating infrastructure.