Barely a month since a Russian company made a similar presentation, a Japanese company has announced its entrance into the Bitcoin mining sector and it could mean a huge deal for the industry.

Tokyo-based GMO Internet Group plans to spend more than $320 million to start mining bitcoin in the first half of 2018. The company plans to go about it by developing its own mining chips which will use 7 nanometer nodes – they are expected to be four times more energy-efficient than the current industry standard 16 nm nodes.

The success of this plan could trigger a greater competition within the Bitcoin mining industry as 7 nm nodes may force other miners to upgrade to another. The stiff competition is very likely as GMO plans in its business model for the mining activity to operate its own mines, rent them to others and develop its own chips that it will package and sell as mining rigs just like China’s Bitmain does.

GMO is the second in the last month to come up with a new Bitcoin mining plan. A Russian company, Russian Miner Coin, proposed a plan to start using semiconductor chips designed in Russia for use in satellites to minimize power consumption in computers for crypto mining.

RMC seeks to raise $100 million in an initial coin offering ICO to launch a project that will take advantage of Russia’s 20 gigawatts of excess power capacity and low consumer electricity prices (about $0.013 cents) per kilowatt hour which is less than the price in China.

Aside the pending competition, the interest in large-scale Bitcoin mining by a Japanese company is also spectacular for the fact that Japan’s government has been one of the most friendliest to the top digital currency. This has reflected greatly in the way Bitcoin has moved up several notches in terms of acceptance in the country from being accepted as a legal means of payment to having taxes eliminated from it.

About 5,000 merchants reportedly accepts Bitcoin for payment in the country. In fact, as at this point, Japan is considered to be a key country that influences the price of Bitcoin.