Yesterday, a surprising news revealed from Media Tek’s (MTK) Q4 financial management meeting of 2017: TSMC’s 12nm chip-productions has been occupied by Bitmain. Although several countries including China have already planned to crack down on digital cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, the bitcoin mining craze seems unabated and the semiconductor industry chain has benefited a lot from it.

The 2017 chip sales of Bitmain reached a staggering 14.3 billion yuan ($2.3billion USD) and it becomes China’s second largest IC design company, ranked only second to HiSilicon. An early miner said that the monthly profits of Bitmain in 2017 was up to $30 million USD and they achieved a net profit of more than 1 billion yuan in the first half of 2017.

Bitmain has also developed and mass-produced a variety of custom ASIC chips with the advanced quantity production technology in full-custom designed 28nm, 16nm, 12nm integrated circuit, the series of BM chip used in cryptocurrency miner could be the most representative one. Bitmian sales hundreds of thousands miners every year, each miner needs hundreds of ASIC chips, for example, an AntMiner S9 needs 189 ASIC chips.

Cryptocurrency mining business also boosts the development of other industries. For instance, TSMC makes a lot of profit from foundry. According to the latest quarterly financial report from TSMC, the quarterly revenue of mining-related business is around $375 million which accounts for 5.1% of the total sales of TSMC.

This business sector also grows rapidly as the price of cryptocurrency rises. The HPC demand brings by the sustained mining boom is expected to boost TSMC’s revenue in 2018 and becomes a timely help for TSMC while iPhone X reduced their order. It can be said that the contribution of mining to TSMC is no less than that of a new iPhone, which makes TSMC becomes the big winner compares to other foundry manufacturers all over the world.

The mining chip business in mainland China drives the global semiconductor industry chain participates in. Cryptocurrency mining is still hot, although early players has already made much profit from it, companies of the semiconductor industry chain still has a lot of opportunities to make money from it if they seize the opportunity. On one hand, enterprises of the semiconductor supply chain are pleased to make money, on the other hand, they also worries about the regulation risks. Cryptocurrency mining is a ‘sweet burden’ for them.