Bitmain: the company, its chips and Antminer miners

Bitmain is a Chinese company that designs and sells ASIC miners under the Antminer brand. It was founded in 2013 in Beijing by two people with very different backgrounds: chip engineer Zhan Ketuan (Micree Zhan) took care of the hardware, financier Wu Jihan (Jihan Wu) took care of the money and the sales. The first product was the Antminer S1 at 180 GH/s and 360 W. After it, mining bitcoin on a home graphics card stopped making sense.

The company is known above all for two things. First: its own chips, which Bitmain designs in house and has fabricated at TSMC. Second: a market share nobody else comes close to. Estimates vary, from half to eighty percent of global bitcoin hardware shipments. There is no exact figure: the company is private and publishes no accounts. But even the low end of that range, half the market, leaves Bitmain the largest supplier in the industry.

The headquarters and the legal center of operations sit in Beijing. The holding company is registered in the Cayman Islands, and the design units work in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Singapore. The chips are made by TSMC in Taiwan, assembly runs mostly in Malaysia, and since December 2024 the first production line in the United States has been operating. This geography came together out of necessity: the 2021 mining ban in China, American tariffs and the customs inspections of recent years all played their part.

Bitmain does more than bitcoin. Our catalog holds 58 Antminer models across eleven algorithms: SHA-256, Scrypt, kHeavyHash, Equihash, Eaglesong, Etchash, X11, Blake2s, Blake2B+SHA3, RandomX and Blake3. Some of these lines the company has effectively closed, others it still develops. Below we go through what is worth buying today and what only makes sense on a very low electricity tariff.

From the S1 to the S23 the draw has fallen from about 2000 J/TH to 9.5. Each chip generation cut the energy spent per unit of work, and each such cut sent the previous generation of hardware either to scrap or to places where a kilowatt costs almost nothing. These dates are a handy way to work out the age of an ASIC when you buy used.

• 2013The company is founded in Beijing. The Antminer S1 arrives: 180 GH/s at 360 W, 55 nm process, around 2000 J/TH.
• 2014Antminer S5, 1.15 TH/s at 590 W. A 28 nm process, energy use falls to roughly 513 J/TH.
• 2015Antminer S7 on the BM1385 chip, 4.73 TH/s at 1293 W. By the middle of the decade the company becomes the largest supplier of miners.
• 2016Antminer S9 on the BM1387 chip, 16 nm, around 98 J/TH. The most widespread model in mining history, part of the fleet is still running.
• 2017A step beyond bitcoin: the L3+ on Scrypt with its own BM1485 chip and the D3 on X11. Diversification across algorithms begins.
• 2018Antminer S9 Hydro with industrial water cooling. In September an IPO application is filed in Hong Kong.
• 2019Antminer S17 and S17 Pro on 7 nm, around 40 J/TH. The IPO application expires in March without a listing. In the fall the conflict between the founders begins.
• 2020Antminer S19 and S19 Pro: 95 and 110 TH/s, 34.5 and 29.5 J/TH. This series is still the backbone of the used market.
• 2021Wu Jihan leaves the company in January, control stays with Zhan Ketuan. BTC.com and Bitdeer are spun off into a separate business. In June China bans mining, shipments are rebuilt around foreign markets. The L7 on Scrypt arrives.
• 2022Antminer S19 XP on the BM1366 chip, 5 nm, 140 TH/s at 3010 W, 21.5 J/TH. The efficiency bar moves below 22 J/TH.
• 2023S19k Pro, then the announcement of the S21 series. In the fall an industry summit shows the ASICs that will define the next two years.
• 2024The S21 series: S21 at 200 TH/s, S21 Pro at 234 TH/s, S21 Hydro at 335 TH/s. At the end of the year the S21 XP Hydro arrives, 473 TH/s at 5676 W, 12 J/TH, and the first assembly line in the United States starts up.
• 2025KS7 on Kaspa (40 TH/s), L11 on Scrypt (0.184 J/MH) and L11 Pro (0.172 J/MH), S21 XP+ Hydro at 500 TH/s. In May the S23 series is shown at the summit in Las Vegas. Regulatory pressure in the United States grows.
• 2026S23 shipments have begun: the air version at 318 TH/s and 11 J/TH, hydro at 580 TH/s and 9.5 J/TH, a 3U version at 1.16 PH/s. For the first time a Bitmain bitcoin miner goes below 10 J/TH. A batch of Antminer X9 on RandomX has been announced.

The letter in an Antminer name tells you the algorithm and the job of the miner. Over its history the company has run twelve lines. Some of them closed together with the coin they were built for, and that is a normal life cycle for narrowly specialized hardware.

Below are all the Antminer models that have their own page with a profitability calculator on asic.es. Every row leads to that page, where you can enter your own electricity tariff and see what the miner would earn in your case. The AsicBoost label means a custom firmware of ours exists for that model.

The first table is bitcoin, sorted by efficiency from best to worst. At the top, the ASICs worth buying new. At the bottom, the ones that only survive on very cheap power. The second table is grouped by algorithm, because their units of measurement differ and they cannot be compared with each other directly.

SHA-256, models: 38

Other algorithms, models: 20

Behind each of the eleven algorithms there is a separate bet the company placed on one particular network. Every algorithm means a separate chip, a separate board and a separate market. The link in the first column leads to a detailed breakdown of the algorithm: how it works, which coins use it, what hardware exists and what the economics look like.

A list of the coins that Bitmain hardware can physically mine. Roughly half the coins on this list do not cover the electricity at European tariffs on any of these ASICs today, and the algorithm pages break that down in figures.

The main technical difference between Bitmain and most of its competitors is that the company designs the chip itself and has TSMC fabricate it. Hence the pace: roughly every eighteen months a new generation appears, and each generation cuts the energy spent per terahash.

The age and class of an ASIC are easiest to read off the chip generation. If the seller does not name the chip, the type can almost always be derived from the model.

Control boards

Power supplies. Bitmain has its own APW line, from the APW3 of the S9 era to the APW12 on the S19 series and the APW17 on the S19j XP, KS5, L9 and S21. The rule is simple: the unit is matched to a specific model and revision, because the voltage, the number of connectors and the startup sequence all differ. On modern hydro miners and 3U chassis the power supply is built in and cannot be replaced separately.

Management and monitoring. Every miner has its own web interface, reachable over the network through the RJ45 port. For a fleet, batch utilities are more practical: they scan the subnet and show every ASIC at once, and Bitmain recommends its own. Custom firmware adds autotuning, power profiles and telemetry for each hash board on top of that.

Diagnostics. The firmware keeps a log, and almost every fault shows up there first: a dropped chip chain, an EEPROM read error, overheating, a lost fan. A breakdown of real log messages is collected in a separate reference of ours, link at the end of the page.

Three cooling schemes. The choice between them pulls the whole site along with it: the wiring, the ventilation, the noise, the servicing and the cost of entry. Changing the decision later is expensive, so think it through before you buy the first batch.

Two classes of firmware live on an Antminer. The first is the factory one: it does exactly what the manufacturer promised, holds the rated frequencies and does not let you go any deeper. For miners under warranty that is the right choice, and all the stock firmware and SD images for 116 models are published separately on our site, together with checksums.

The second class is custom builds. Ours is called AsicBoost, it is installed through HashCore Toolkit and it supports 28 Antminer models from the catalog: the whole S19 series, the S21 series, T9+, T19 and T21, and on Scrypt the L7 and L9. The developer fee is 2.8 percent, and it is taken in hashrate, not in money: a 100 TH/s miner sends 97.2 TH/s to your pool and the remaining 2.8 TH/s go to the developer. There is no way to put a euro figure on that in advance, it depends on the algorithm, the coin, network difficulty and the exchange rate on the day. What the fee gives you in practice: autotuning per hash board, power profiles from economy to overclock, precise fan control based on chip temperature, and telemetry that the factory firmware simply does not have.

The main practical gain is not in overclocking but in the opposite: on an older ASIC such as the S19j Pro an economy profile lets you take off part of the power and come back into profit where the factory firmware already leaves it in the red. Overclocking makes sense with cheap energy and good cooling, and it always shortens the hardware life.

Whether installation is possible depends on the model and on the type of control board: Xilinx, BeagleBone, Amlogic or CVITEK. Amlogic boards need unlocking over UART first, otherwise firmware rollback is blocked. Installing custom firmware voids the manufacturer warranty, and that applies to any third party build without exception.

On third party firmware in general: there are several on the market, the quality varies, and the main risk is not the fee but the closed code and the fact that some builds leave the miner without a bootloader after a failed update. Check whether a build has a proper rollback to stock and a clear recovery procedure from an SD card, before you flash it across the whole fleet.

Since we ask this of others, we will answer for ourselves too. Rolling back to factory firmware on AsicBoost is done from the miner's own web interface: the address http://miner-ip/system/maintenance, or in the left menu the System item, Maintenance tab, Firmware Reset block. There are two buttons there and they should not be mixed up: Rollback to stock puts the miner back on the factory version, while Reset only resets the firmware itself and does not return it to stock. The same page has Backup settings with a Create archive button: save the configuration before the rollback, and after the return you will not have to type in pools and profiles again.

Spare parts for an Antminer are easier to find than for other brands: more miners were produced, so the secondary market for parts is wider. Individual ASIC chips, including the recent BM1370 and BM1373, are sold one at a time. That has a direct effect on the economics: a repair is almost always cheaper than a replacement.

An Antminer is repairable, and that is one of the reasons fleets of these miners are kept beyond their nominal service life. Almost all diagnostics start with the log: the error codes in it tell you which assembly is at fault before the ASIC is opened. How to avoid reaching the repair stage at all is covered in a separate section below.

An Antminer lasts about five years under normal conditions, and that is an estimate from practice. The real spread is wide: a clean, cool room and stable power can extend the life noticeably, while dust and heat cut it several times over. ASICs from 2016 are still running in places.

The weak points are predictable: fans first, then the power supply, then the hash boards. The control board and the electronics themselves usually outlive everything else. So the main running cost of a fleet is fans and filters.

Reliability also takes a hit from the quality of the mains. Voltage sags, phase imbalance and frequent outages hit power supplies harder than years of operation do. A stabilizer and proper wiring pay for themselves faster than you would think.

Bitmain's warranty is standard for the industry, but the paperwork requirements are strict. The key rule: the claim has to be opened before the warranty period ends, not after. And if the faulty part is not shipped within seven days of opening the claim, the claim is closed.

Efficiency is measured in joules per terahash, J/TH: how much energy an ASIC spends per unit of useful work. Lower is better. This is the key number when buying, because it directly determines the tariff at which the miner still turns a profit. Hashrate tells you the size of the revenue, efficiency tells you the size of the power bill.

Below is how the SHA-256 series evolved. Between the S9 and the best miner of 2026 the gap is roughly tenfold: where the old one burns a kilowatt-hour, the new one does the same work on a hundred watt-hours.

Other algorithms use their own units, and those units cannot be compared with each other. Scrypt is counted in J/MH: the L3+ is about 1.59 J/MH, the L7 about 0.36, the L9 about 0.21, the L11 about 0.184, the L11 Pro about 0.172. Equihash uses J/kSol, X11 uses J/GH, RandomX uses J/kH. Even the same unit on different algorithms is no reason to compare directly: a terahash of SHA-256 and a terahash of kHeavyHash are different amounts of work.

How to turn efficiency into money. Multiply the draw in watts by 24 and divide by 1000, and you get kilowatt-hours per day. Multiply by your tariff and you get the daily bill. For an S21 at 3500 W that is 84 kWh per day, and at a Spanish tariff of about 0.155 euros per kilowatt-hour it works out to roughly 13 euros a day, that is about 390 euros a month for electricity alone.

Calculate the profitability of a specific model →

Bitmain has two direct competitors in bitcoin: MicroBT with the Whatsminer brand and Canaan with the Avalon brand. We compare by the criteria that actually shape a buying decision.

Over the past couple of years a third notable player joined those two: Bitdeer with the SealMiner line. The company itself once spun off from Bitmain, and in April 2026 it announced the SealMiner A4 Ultra Hydro at 9.45 J/TH, formally better than the S23 hydro version. With one caveat: that is a figure claimed at announcement, not verified volume shipments.

The short conclusion. If peak efficiency, parts availability and the option of custom firmware matter, people buy Antminer. If the site sits in a hot climate with an unstable grid, Whatsminer often turns out to be more practical. If entry price decides and you have your own hands for repairs, look at Avalon. And if you are unsure, put your own tariff into the profitability calculator and compare specific models in money.

Overheating. The most common cause of lost hashrate. The ASIC throttles its frequency itself, and if that does not help, it stops. Usually the problem is not the ASIC but the room: hot air comes back to the intake, extraction cannot keep up, the inlet is clogged. The rule: cold and hot flows must be physically separated.

Dust. It kills miners more quietly than any other cause. A layer of dust on the heatsink works like a blanket, temperature climbs, service life drops. On construction sites and next to a dirt road cleaning is needed once a quarter, and intake filters are cheaper than any repair.

EEPROM errors. The board stops being detected, and the log shows a memory read error. Often a consequence of a voltage spike or a failed firmware update. Prevention is simple: stable power and updates in batches rather than the whole fleet at once.

Fan failure. The easiest of all to head off: keep a stock of fans on site and react to a change in sound, it always comes before the error in the log.

Power supply failure. It shows up as reboots under load or a failure to start. Before swapping the unit, check the socket, the cable and the mains voltage: quite often the unit is not at fault.

Problems after a firmware update. The miner does not come up after flashing. There are two causes: incompatibility with the control board type and an interrupted process due to power or network. Always keep the factory SD image for your model at hand.

Voltage spikes. They hit power supplies and board memory. A stabilizer, proper breakers and sound wiring pay for themselves on the very first incident.

Overly aggressive overclocking. The extra percent of hashrate is paid for with service life. At a high intake temperature overclocking turns into accelerated wear, and the hashboard is the first to go.

A sequence of steps that saves more over time than tuning frequencies. Nothing exotic, but some of these steps get skipped regularly.

1. Prepare the room before buyingSeparate cold and hot air flows, extraction with headroom, a filter on the intake. One miner is 3.5 kilowatts of heat, and ten are already a ventilation project.
2. Check the electricsA dedicated line, a breaker with headroom, proper earthing, and size it by rated power plus twenty percent, not by the average.
3. Start on factory firmware and record baseline readingsHashrate, board temperatures, fan speeds over the first day. This is your reference point, the one you compare any deviation against later.
4. Update firmware deliberatelyFirst one miner, then a batch, then the fleet. The factory image for rollback must be sitting next to you before you press the button.
5. Set up monitoringAlerts on a hashrate drop and on rising temperature.
6. Clean by the calendar, not by the symptomOnce every three months on a dusty site, once every six months in a clean room. Compressed air, the ASIC powered down, careful around the heatsinks.
7. Replace fans earlyOnce every one or two years, without waiting for a failure. They cost next to nothing and they save the hashboard.
8. Store it properlyA dry room, the miner in its original box, the power supply separately. The main risk in storage is condensation when temperature swings.
9. Ship it as fragileOriginal packaging, upright, no stacking above three boxes. The first things to suffer are the connectors and the heatsinks.
10. Keep a fleet logSerial number, start date, history of repairs and replacements. From twenty miners up there is no other way to work out the real cost of ownership.

A summary of the brand in figures, calculated from our catalog and from the manufacturer's official specifications. The catalog numbers count only the models that have a page on the site.

• 2013The Antminer S1 and the entry into the market: bitcoin mining moves away from graphics cards to dedicated hardware for good.
• 2015The company becomes the largest supplier of bitcoin miners. A side effect for the buyer that still matters today: the widest parts and service market of any brand.
• 2016The Antminer S9 on 16 nm sets the standard for years ahead. Some of these ASICs are in their tenth year of work.
• 2018The S9 Hydro takes water cooling out of the homebrew world and into production. For the owner that means roughly 20 dB quieter and noticeably denser power per rack.
• 2019The move to 7 nm in the S17 series. The power bill per terahash falls by almost half in a single generation.
• 2022The S19 XP on 5 nm. The 21.5 J/TH mark makes a fleet upgrade worthwhile even where the old miners are still running.
• 2024The S21 XP Hydro at 12 J/TH. Hydro stops being exotic and becomes the default format for industrial sites.
• 2026The S23 Hydro at 9.5 J/TH and the 3U version at 1.16 PH/s in one chassis, the first production miner above a petahash. The break even tariff shifts, and that puts pressure on the whole used market.