Trump's sons back bitcoin mining company that's going public

A bitcoin mining company backed by President Donald Trump’s sons announced plans to go public Monday through a merger that gives the family a foothold in the U.S. and Canadian energy business.

American Bitcoin, the mining firm backed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., said Monday that it would go public on the Nasdaq through a merger with public company Gryphon Digital Mining. The combined company will operate as American Bitcoin, which lists Eric Trump as a co-founder and chief strategy officer.

The merger marks a more aggressive move by the Trump family into the electricity infrastructure that enables its digital currency business. American Bitcoin started out as a subsidiary of the Miami-based energy infrastructure company Hut 8, which has a portfolio of 15 sites in the United States and Canada totaling more than 1,000 megawatts of energy capacity. Hut 8 will act as American Bitcoin’s exclusive infrastructure and operations partner, according to the companies’ announcement, and American Bitcoin previously said it would co-locate miners at Hut 8 sites.

A presentation by American Bitcoin says that the new venture aims to “become a category leader in the Bitcoin ecosystem” and to achieve “mining leadership” through “Hut 8’s energy advantage, rapid execution and proven team.” The company, the presentation says, can also leverage and expand “access to low-cost power, establishing a fundamental operational advantage” to its mining business.

Upon returning to Washington, Trump lost no time standing behind tech executives pledging hundreds of billions of dollars to build data centers big enough to command the lead over China in developing artificial intelligence. And Trump has said he wants the U.S. to be the crypto capital of the world, including by opening up energy resources to boost digital mining. “If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted and made in the USA,” Trump said at an industry conference last July while running for his second term.

The White House has framed Trump’s “energy abundance” agenda as an economic necessity for America’s powerful tech companies — largely to power an AI boom, but also for energy-hungry crypto mining and high-tech manufacturing. The White House has rolled out executive orders designed to speed permitting and bypass environmental rules to get data centers and power plants built more quickly. And the Energy Department plans to help private companies build data centers on federal land, including at national labs.

Through American Bitcoin — a Hut 8 subsidiary that was briefly called American Data Center — the Trump family business venture is delving deeper into the energy space where federal policies under Trump intersect directly with access to electricity and fuels. And that comes as the energy industry is in some turmoil. On-again, off-again tariffs and the global economic implications are contributing to a slump in oil prices and pushing up costs for energy technology. Trump has put natural gas build-outs and reviving old coal plants at the center of his energy policy, while attacks on wind and solar power are pushing more of that investment to the sideline.

In an April call launching American Bitcoin, Eric Trump said the winner of the bitcoin race will be “whoever can do it best and most efficiently and most pragmatically, in the cheapest energy environments.”

“We’ve got the best energy policy in this country. That policy is only getting better,” he said in April.

The growing web of Trump-affiliated ventures, including a currency firm World Liberty Financial and the $TRUMP memecoin, are attracting greater scrutiny. Senate Democrats pulled support for bipartisan crypto legislation earlier this month after the Trump family business announced it had completed a $2 billion digital coin deal for a transaction led by MGX, a large investment fund backed by United Arab Emirates.

MGX is also an investor in Stargate, a U.S. data center megaproject that Trump rolled out on his first day in office. Stargate investors OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and MGX are building its first project in Abilene, Texas, and plan to tap Texas natural gas production for electricity.

Conflicts of interest

The decision to take American Bitcoin public by merging with a Nasdaq-traded firm increases access to technology investors, including those with interests in energy.

The “mining” of digital currency requires massive amounts of computing power. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated last year that digital currency mining accounted for as much as 2.3 percent of the nation’s electricity use based on publicly available data. Plans to survey crypto companies about their energy consumption and sources of energy were halted after an industry lawsuit last year and have not been revived under the Trump administration.

American Bitcoin did not detail what sources of energy it planned to use or where it would build new mining sites. The company also did not reply to a request for comment.

Hut 8 currently owns some or all of 15 power and digital infrastructure sites in Canada and the U.S., according to regulatory filings. That includes a site powered by wind and grid connections in the Texas Pan