Canaan Creative, the world’s second largest bitcoin mining machine manufacturer, said it expects to sell 1 million bitcoin miners in 2020 as buying interest increases.

Chen Feng, sales director of the Hangzhou, China-based company, said in a live streaming interview with 8btc that the company had already received letters of intent demanding 500,000 units of its latest powerful A10 and A11 miners in total, and they expect the number to surpass 1 million in 2020.

As the company’s official website shows, the Avalonminer A10 series are priced between RMB6,541 yuan ($924) to RMB11,900 yuan ($1,680), and A11 models are priced between RMB9,999 yuan ($1,412) to RMB16,252 yuan ($2,295). If the goal could be achieved, a total of 1 million units would bring approximately $1.57 billion (assuming equal sales between both models) for the company.

To cater to the increasing market demand amid the bitcoin rally unexpectedly coming this April, bitcoin miner makers have been working in full swing on increasing their output. As previously reported by 8btc, Bitmain has ordered 30,000 7nm wafers from world’s largest dedicated semiconductor foundry TSMC, which could output 90 million chips for about 625,000 units of 7nm miners (assuming all are Antminer S17 models).

Last month, MicroBT said it would have delivered 200,000 units of its latest M20 models by the end of September. While investors having to wait until January 2020 to receive the mining equipment keep placing pre-orders for those bitcoin producers.

According to Wang Shenglin, sales director of Innosilicon, the bitcoin network currently has about 4.3 million mining machines running on it, while the company estimates that the market is still seeing an increasing level of buying interest with 1.5 million mining equipment in short.

Despite these mining giants’ great ambition, the supply capacity from chip manufacturers such as TSMC and Samsung remains a major bottleneck for the production capacity of all crypto miner makers whose need are usually behind other electronic device makers for smartphone and PC.

For another, bitcoin price’s recent sharp drops since July would place downward pressure on the crypto market, which may scare off potential bitcoin miners. While the climbing bitcoin hashrate seems to indicate that miners are still confident of the prospect.

According to Chen, a lot of big institutions and funds have already invested in bitcoin mining, and more institutional investors are coming with orders or pre-orders of multimillion-dollar worth miners. While if the bitcoin price still stay sideways in following months, bitcoin hashrate would go down in November as cheap electricity in Sichuan comes to an end as rainy season ends, electricity price rise and some old machines may be obsoleted from the market. But the delivery of miners with much higher hashrate (most above 50T) would soon boost the bitcoin hashrate.

Kong Jianping, cofounder of Canaan, estimated that bitcoin hashrate might double by the end of 2020 if bitcoin price goes up after the halving.