August brought a familiar split to the Bitcoin mining business: more listed miners pushed capital, power and site capacity into AI and HPC, while the economics of conventional mining remained weak.
The month also produced a heavy stream of company filings, financing deals, protocol disputes and legal developments. Poolin creditors formed a committee on Aug. 12, a mining machine smuggling case in Ningbo became public, and BIP-110 drew only about 2.6% miner signaling support. At the same time, a wide range of miners released quarterly results and operating updates that showed how quickly revenue models are diverging across the sector.
Capex kept climbing as miners leaned harder into AI and HPC
According to TheEnergyMag, listed Bitcoin miners and their AI data center peers spent $30.7 billion in capital expenditures in the first half of 2026, topping the $21.53 billion spent in all of 2025, a 42.6% increase.
Within that total, 12 listed miners spent $6.87 billion in the first half, already above the $6.5 billion they spent during all of 2025. AI-native cloud companies CoreWeave, at $14.12 billion, and Nebius, at $8.13 billion, accounted for nearly three quarters of the total spending by the 15 companies in the sample.
Among miners, TeraWulf led with $1.61 billion, followed by Applied Digital at $1.58 billion, Core Scientific at $1.18 billion and Cipher at $911.5 million.
Revenue from HPC and AI operations still remained small relative to spending. TheEnergyMag said HPC and AI revenue at nine major miners rose 52% quarter over quarter in Q2 to $205.8 million, reaching $341.2 million for the first half, but capex during the same period was nearly 15 times that revenue.
Tracked hashrate, difficulty and miner income indicators all weakened
TheEnergyMag said that as public Bitcoin miners redirected more power and infrastructure toward AI and HPC, the tracked realized hashrate of listed miners it follows fell from 368.3 EH/s in the fourth quarter of 2025 to 319 EH/s in the second quarter of 2026, down 13.4% in six months. Over the same period, Bitcoin’s network-wide average quarterly hashrate fell 10.6%.
Excluding Bitdeer, which kept expanding against the broader trend, realized hashrate across the rest of the miner sample dropped 21.2%. TheEnergyMag said the contraction was driven mainly by weaker mining economics and competition between AI and Bitcoin mining for both capital and power.
CoinDesk, citing Hashrate Index data, reported that Bitcoin mining difficulty most recently fell 0.74% to 126.23 T. That put difficulty about 14% below the January 2026 peak, around 19.1% below the all-time high, and below its level from a year earlier. It marked only the second year-over-year decline in Bitcoin history.
The report said weaker BTC prices, lower mining revenue and the shift of capital and electricity into AI and high-performance computing were the main reasons hashrate growth remained under pressure. The hashrate forward market expects only a modest improvement in unit hashrate revenue later this year.
Glassnode data showed transaction fees accounted for just 0.69% of miner revenue, still close to the 10-year low of 0.52% set in April. The fee share has been below 1% for nearly a year, leaving miners more dependent on the 3.125 BTC block subsidy.
Checkonchain data showed Bitcoin network hashrate fell from a peak of 1.3 ZH/s in October 2025 to 861 EH/s, a decline of about 33%. As of Tuesday, the estimated average production cost per BTC stood at $78,254, about 23% above the spot price at that time, according to Cointelegraph.
Digital Asset reported that Bitcoin miner holdings fell to about 1.1919 million BTC as of Aug. 15, down 885 BTC from a week earlier and the lowest level since May 31. A decline in miner balances usually means some miners are using BTC for sales, loans or collateral.
Over the same period, Blockchain com data showed the seven-day moving average of Bitcoin network hashrate was about 895 million TH/s, down about 25.48 million TH/s from a week earlier. The Puell Multiple was 0.75, unchanged from a week earlier and still in a historical range that is neither clearly overheated nor extremely undervalued.
Shutdown prices rose, and some machine models were already under water
Data from the WuShuo data center showed that as of Aug. 6, about 22.7% of 22 mainstream BTC mining machine models were already generating negative daily net profit.
The most efficient model had an estimated shutdown price of about $46,787. Under the power price and other assumptions used in the calculation, that means even the most efficient machine would move into a shutdown threshold if BTC fell below that level.
At an electricity price of $0.05/kWh, Bitcoin’s base shutdown price was about $31,992 as of Aug. 14, while the BTC market price was about $63,492, or 1.98 times that level. Differences between machine models were large. The S19 Pro+ Hyd. had a shutdown price of about $66,487, already above the prevailing BTC price. The shutdown prices for the S19 XP Hyd., S19 XP+ Hyd. and S21 Hyd. were about $50,292, $45,937 and $38,683, respectively.
When depreciation is included, the breakeven BTC price for some older machines was already above $80,000.
Riot signed with Anthropic, while Tether’s Uruguay sites went offline
Bloomberg reported that Anthropic signed a long-term cloud computing agreement worth about $9.1 billion with Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms to secure compute capacity for Claude. Riot will provide 191 MW of data center capacity from its Rockdale campus in Texas under a contract that runs for 20 years.
Bloomberg said the deal also showed Riot moving further from Bitcoin mining toward AI data center operations.
Reuters reported that two Bitcoin mining sites Tether had built in Uruguay have stopped operating. The project stalled mainly because of a dispute with state-owned utility UTE over the scale of electricity supply.
A former Tether contractor estimated the company invested about $120 million across the two facilities, though Tether did not comment. Documents reviewed by Reuters showed the parties disagreed over whether the power volume in the contract represented a guaranteed minimum or a maximum cap, which at one stage left the sites without enough electricity.
Microfin, Tether’s local entity, stopped paying part of the electricity bill in 2025 and in June proposed ending the contract. UTE then cut power to the sites on July 25, 2025. Tether had earlier viewed Uruguay as the first step in a broader South American Bitcoin mining expansion, but miners are now leaning more heavily toward AI and HPC as mining margins stay under pressure and energy costs rise.
Bitdeer posted higher production, reported earnings and added deployment plans
Bitdeer said it mined 1,190 BTC in July 2026, up 322% from a year earlier. At the end of July, the company held 257 BTC.
On the AI side, Bitdeer had deployed 4,248 GPUs with 95% utilization and annualized recurring revenue of about $76 million. Its 9.5 MW A102 facility in Malaysia was fully covered by a long-term offtake agreement, with expected total contract revenue above $800 million.
Bitdeer had also announced a 16-year AI/HPC data center lease for its Tydal campus in Norway, with contract revenue of about $4.7 billion.
In its Q2 2026 earnings, Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR) reported total revenue of $228.8 million, a net loss of $92.3 million and adjusted EBITDA of $31.1 million. Self-mining revenue was $168.4 million and AI Cloud revenue was $14 million. The company mined 2,694 BTC in the quarter and held 150 BTC as of June 30.
TheEnergyMag also reported that Bitdeer will deploy about 28 MW of Bitcoin mining equipment at Soluna’s Project Kati 1 in South Texas, adding an estimated 1.93 EH/s of hashrate. Deployment is expected to begin in phases from September 2026.
Bitdeer will provide and own the Sealminer A2 Pro Air machines, while Soluna will handle the site, power and operations. The two companies will split mining revenue under a revenue-sharing model. Project Kati 1 is an 83 MW data center powered by the Las Majadas wind project.
Soluna, CleanSpark and IREN showed the same shift in different forms
Soluna Holdings said total revenue for the second quarter of 2026 was $15.06 million, up from $6.16 million a year earlier. Data hosting revenue rose to $12.65 million, while cryptocurrency mining revenue fell to $1.72 million.
Net loss attributable to the company was $20.71 million for the quarter and $38.18 million for the first half. As of June 30, total assets stood at $294 million and total liabilities at $81.82 million.
The company also amended a credit agreement with Generate Lending, received waivers for some reporting and operating compliance matters, and agreed to make early repayments of about $5.69 million and $13.43 million.
CleanSpark reported revenue of $138 million for the third quarter of fiscal 2026, down 30.5% year over year. It posted a net loss of $239.8 million, compared with net income of $257.4 million a year earlier, and adjusted EBITDA of negative $113 million, versus positive $377.7 million a year earlier.
As of June 30, CleanSpark held $202.6 million in cash, Bitcoin holdings worth $814.9 million, net long-term debt of $1.78 billion and working capital of $761 million. For the Sandersville project, it signed a 20-year triple-net lease worth $6.6 billion with an investment-grade tenant. The company said all expected equity financing for the project had been secured and all long-lead equipment needed for the targeted launch schedule had been ordered and prepaid. It now controls more than 1.8 GW of power, land and data center resources in the U.S.
In its July operating update, CleanSpark said it produced 586 BTC, sold 229 spot BTC and another 350 BTC due to call option exercises, and held 13,931 BTC as of July 31. Operating hashrate reached 50 EH/s, average hashrate was 38.6 EH/s, deployed machines totaled 230,507, and contracted power capacity reached 1.8 GW.
The company also said it signed a 20-year triple-net lease with a global technology company carrying a high investment-grade rating at its Sandersville campus in Georgia, with an initial term contract value of $6.6 billion.
IREN, which is repositioning itself as an AI infrastructure provider, delivered the first Horizon AI Cloud project to Microsoft. It is one of four deployment phases under the companies’ five-year, $9.7 billion agreement. Horizon 1 is a 50 MW site at Childress, Texas, using Nvidia GB300 GPUs. The full four phases are expected to total 200 MW, with the remaining projects due later this year. IREN’s target is to expand AI cloud capacity to 1.2 GW in 2027.
IREN reported fiscal Q4 2026 revenue of $137.2 million, broadly in line with expectations, and adjusted EBITDA of $19.2 million, about 53% below expectations. AI cloud services revenue rose quarter over quarter from $33.6 million to $70.5 million, while Bitcoin mining revenue fell from $111.2 million to $66.7 million.
The company said current operating ARR is about $1 billion, with 2026 capacity largely sold out and contracted ARR around $4 billion. It also signed a new multiyear contract with a frontier AI lab. Recent three-year contracts generated more than $20 million of revenue per IT MW, with some negotiations at around $25 million. IREN plans to raise cumulative IT capacity from about 0.3 GW in 2026 to about 0.8 GW in 2027. Existing cash, committed GPU financing and customer prepayments total about $14 billion.
MARA, TeraWulf, Ionic and Cipher reported financing and revenue shifts
The Energy Mag reported that on Aug. 4, MARA closed two loans with Coinbase Credit and Two Prime Lending, pledging 18,750 BTC as collateral. The collateral was worth about $1.2 billion at the time, and the company obtained about $600 million in new funds.
Total principal across the two loans was $750 million. The $450 million loan from Coinbase included a refinancing of an existing $150 million credit facility, leaving $300 million in net new funds from that lender. Two Prime provided another $300 million loan. The Coinbase loan currently carries an interest rate of about 7.5%, while the Two Prime loan has a fixed rate of 7.65%. Both mature in 2028.
MARA said the proceeds will be used for general corporate purposes, including energy asset acquisitions and expansion of Bitcoin mining, AI and HPC infrastructure.
In its Q2 2026 earnings, MARA reported revenue of $175 million, down 27% year over year, a net loss of $611 million, and adjusted EBITDA of negative $361 million. Ending hashrate rose 22% to 70.3 EH/s, Bitcoin production rose 3% to 2,422 BTC, and daily cost per unit of hashrate fell 4% to $27.7. BTC holdings fell 29% year over year to 35,577 BTC, while the combined value of cash and Bitcoin was about $2.5 billion.
The company currently has 1.4 GW of operating capacity and 1.9 GW of existing total capacity. It plans to expand potential total capacity to about 4.8 GW through the acquisition of Long Ridge and development of the Matagorda project in Texas, though completion, regulatory approvals, grid interconnection and construction timelines remain uncertain.
TeraWulf reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $44.767 million. Digital asset revenue was $12.835 million, down about 73% year over year, while HPC leasing revenue was $31.932 million, or about 71% of total revenue. Net loss for the quarter was $940.8 million, driven mainly by a $755.67 million loss from changes in the fair value of warrants.
As of June 30, TeraWulf held digital assets worth $133,000. Lake Mariner had 102 MW of revenue-generating critical IT capacity online, and some former Bitcoin mining infrastructure was being repurposed for HPC development.
TheEnergyMag said Nasdaq-listed Ionic Digital posted second-quarter revenue of $48.6 million, up 31% year over year. Digital infrastructure leasing revenue, including AI data center operations, reached $43.8 million, roughly 90% of total revenue, while Bitcoin mining revenue fell from $37.2 million a year earlier to $4.8 million.
The company is converting its Ward County site in Texas into an AI infrastructure campus and has signed a long-term lease with Nscale worth about $1.95 billion in contract revenue. Ionic was originally formed from Bitcoin mining assets tied to Celsius’s bankruptcy restructuring.
Cipher Digital said that as of June 30, 2026, it held BTC worth about $37.802 million. Second-quarter revenue was $25 million and adjusted EBITDA was negative $30 million.
The company delivered the first capacity at its Black Pearl data center two months ahead of schedule and began collecting rent. It also secured a development option for the Apollo data center project site near San Antonio, Texas, with capacity of up to 900 MW. Cipher also completed a bond offering to fully fund construction of the Stingray data center project.
HIVE, Hut 8, Cango, BitFuFu and Bitari added more pieces to the picture
TheEnergyMag reported that tax disputes in Sweden over input VAT deductions tied to crypto mining are pushing some miners to reallocate local hashrate assets.
HIVE said in its latest earnings that it recorded an $84.7 million non-cash provision related to the Swedish VAT dispute, and that tax enforcement and uncertainty had reduced the economic viability of conventional hashrate operations there. The company is gradually reducing ASIC mining and shifting its Boden facility toward AI and HPC. Northern Data’s Swedish subsidiary is also facing VAT disputes involving hundreds of millions of Swedish kronor, though those decisions remain under dispute or appeal.
Bitcoin miner and energy infrastructure company Hut 8 said in a 10-Q filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that second-quarter 2026 revenue was $74.93 million, up from $41.3 million a year earlier. Compute revenue rose to $72.5 million, mainly because Bitcoin production increased from 308 BTC to 935 BTC.
The company posted a net loss of $177 million, compared with net income of $137 million a year earlier, mainly because of a $138.6 million loss from the fair value of digital assets. As of June 30, Hut 8 held 17,316 BTC on a consolidated basis, worth about $1.04 billion at quarter-end prices. Of that total, about 9,314 BTC was held by Hut 8 and about 8,002 BTC by majority-owned subsidiary American Bitcoin. Another 3,090 BTC had been pledged to mining machine maker Bitmain.
TheEnergyMag reported that Cango (NYSE: CANG) posted unaudited Q2 2026 revenue of $50.8 million, down about 50% from the prior quarter. Net loss from continuing operations was $81.6 million, narrower than the $261.1 million loss in Q1, mainly because of a $42.9 million mining machine impairment and an $8.5 million loss on equipment disposals. Adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed to $10.7 million.
Cango ended the quarter with 27.58 EH/s of operating hashrate, including 19.84 EH/s of self-mining capacity and 7.74 EH/s of leased hashrate. It mined 656 BTC in the quarter, reduced average cash cost per BTC to $73,313, and held 1,056 BTC at the end of June.
On AI infrastructure, its 3 MW site in Georgia was retrofitted in early July and is expected to provide bare-metal GPU hosting and colocation services, with the first revenue expected in the third quarter. The company has also deployed test nodes in Texas and on the U.S. West Coast.
BitFuFu reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $42.8 million, down 62.9% year over year, a net loss of $20.5 million, compared with net income of $47.1 million a year earlier, and adjusted EBITDA of negative $18.4 million.
The company said total managed hashrate fell to 15.3 EH/s because of lower cloud mining demand, lower year-over-year Bitcoin prices and hashrate optimization, but self-mining output rose to 192 BTC. As of the end of June, BitFuFu held 1,671 BTC, while cash and digital assets totaled about $119.5 million. It said total managed hashrate had recovered to about 20 EH/s by mid-August.
The Wall Street Journal reported that in July BitFuFu produced 112 BTC, including 72 BTC from self-mining and 40 BTC from cloud mining. Month-end holdings fell to 1,314 BTC from 1,671 BTC at the end of June.
BitFuFu said the drop in BTC holdings mainly reflected the use of some BTC as prepayments to lock in future hashrate scheduled to come online in August for a 330-day term. As of the end of July, total managed hashrate stood at 14.2 EH/s, including 3.6 EH/s of proprietary hashrate, up 2.9% month over month. Total managed power capacity was 255 MW. The company expects managed hashrate to recover to about 20 EH/s by mid-August as the additional hashrate locked in during June and July comes online.
According to SEC filings, Bitari Inc., a Bitcoin mining infrastructure and hosting services company, filed an S-1 to sell about 4.286 million shares at $7 each, seeking about $30 million and applying to list on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker BIAI. The offering remains subject to approval.
After fees, net proceeds are expected to total about $26.95 million, with about 40% earmarked for strategic acquisitions and investments and 15% for new mining sites and infrastructure construction.
ZEC mining economics improved sharply as Cypherpunk and Fortitude expanded
TheEnergyMag said that after ZEC rose about 70% over the past week and briefly touched about $890, power-based revenue from Zcash mining widened further relative to Bitcoin mining and AI/HPC.
Using its Aug. 24 calculation, an Antminer Z15 Pro mining ZEC could generate about $727 in gross revenue per megawatt-hour of electricity, roughly 3.3 times the average AI/HPC revenue in the industry and 4.5 times the revenue of the Antminer S23 Pro Bitcoin machine. Since late June, per-power revenue for the Z15 Pro increased about 95%, while the S23 Pro rose only about 22%.
Nasdaq-listed Zcash treasury company Cypherpunk Technologies (CYPH) said it has launched a ZEC mining business. Its subsidiary Cypherpunk Mining has deployed about 4.2 GSol/s of Equihash hashrate in the U.S., equal to about 18% of the total Zcash network hashrate.
The company said that fleet is now the largest active mining fleet on the Zcash network. The mining machines were financed through a $33.33 million equity transaction between Cypherpunk and Winklevoss Capital. The company also appointed industry veteran Kevin Zhang as head of mining.
Cypherpunk currently holds 323,394 ZEC, about 1.92% of circulating supply, and said it plans to keep building toward a target of holding 5% of total ZEC supply through mining and later accumulation. The Block reported the development.
DCG-backed Zcash miner Fortitude said second-quarter 2026 revenue was $20.9 million, adjusted EBITDA was $8.5 million, net loss was $9.5 million, and it recorded a $10.3 million impairment charge on mining equipment.
During the quarter, Fortitude mined about 33,646 ZEC, ran average hashrate of 4.0 GSol/s, and controlled more than 60 MW of power capacity across seven sites. The company is pursuing a public listing through a proposed business combination with Nasdaq-listed medical technology company HeartSciences (HSCS), with the transaction expected to close in the second half of 2026.
OCEAN, BIP-54 and BIP-110 remained major points of conflict
Bitcoin mining pool OCEAN and co-founder Luke Dashjr said in a joint statement that they had agreed to part ways. Luke Dashjr resigned as chairman, chief technology officer and director, and OCEAN repurchased all of his equity.
Both sides said the separation reflected different visions for the future direction of Bitcoin mining after recent protocol changes. Luke Dashjr will launch a new project called CONVOY to continue promoting decentralization in Bitcoin mining, while OCEAN will keep operating its non-custodial mining pool business.
Bitcoin News reported that Bitcoin developers completed the BIP-54 “Consensus Cleanup” specification. The proposal would use a soft fork to address four consensus edge risks: time warp attacks, malicious blocks with very high validation costs, a 64-byte transaction Merkle proof vulnerability, and duplicate Coinbase transactions. It does not add new features.
F2Pool co-founder Wang Chun said he does not support BIP-54, but if the proposal is activated strictly under the BIP-9 mechanism and reaches the required supermajority miner signaling threshold, he will update his mining nodes. Until then, he will not participate in signaling support.
BIP-54 is a Bitcoin soft fork proposal aimed at fixing long-standing consensus-layer issues including time warp attacks, extreme block validation time under edge cases, weaknesses in the Merkle tree, and duplicate transaction validation. BIP-9 is the version-bits signaling mechanism used to coordinate soft fork lock-in and activation.
Strategy founder Michael Saylor wrote that at block 960,561, BIP-110 received only 24 signals in 946 blocks, equal to 2.54%, and that all of those signals came from DATUM miners sharing rewards through OCEAN. Signals from outside OCEAN were zero.
He said the 55% voluntary activation threshold had already become mathematically unreachable in the current cycle and that this should not be interpreted as miner consensus. Saylor also argued that OCEAN had made BIP-110 signaling the default setting on its existing endpoints, while the BIP-110 guide directed node operators to use Bitcoin Knots and miners to use DATUM. In his view, it looked more like a vertically integrated marketing push for Knots and OCEAN/DATUM.
BIP-110 supporter Roughnecks later said it would stop mining under the organization’s name and advised miners currently using the existing PoW algorithm to mine the BIP-110 chain to pause participation. Roughnecks had previously mined the only two blocks so far on the BIP-110 fork chain and said halting mining was not an admission of failure but preparation for the “next phase,” according to Bitcoin News.
Saylor then said in a post on X that BIP-110 had failed to win broad miner backing after gaining only 2.6% signaling support. At block 961,632, nodes supporting BIP-110 would begin rejecting blocks that did not signal accordingly. After that, he said, BIP-110 would stall or fork into irrelevance while the Bitcoin network continued to operate normally.
Pool closures, bankruptcy proceedings and regional policy shifts
SBI Crypto, the mining company under Japan’s SBI Holdings, shut down its pool service on July 31 and turned off the Stratum servers used to connect miners.
Its seven-day average hashrate fell from 16.222 EH/s on June 30 to 5.817 EH/s on July 30, a drop of about 64% in one month. CryptoSlate said Foundry USA, AntPool and F2Pool briefly accounted for about 60% of recent Bitcoin block production that same day, but their combined share had already exceeded 60% before SBI Crypto shut down, and existing data cannot confirm where SBI’s lost hashrate went.
Poolin’s creditor committee was formed on Aug. 12 and has retained legal counsel on behalf of all creditors to participate in and oversee the bankruptcy process. The case concerns a bankruptcy asset sale and liquidation, and creditors do not need to hire their own lawyers. Claims can be submitted through the official Verita Global page.
According to that page, Poolin Technology PTE. LTD. and two other debtors filed for Chapter 11 protection on July 22, 2026. The cases are being jointly administered in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey.
Bits media reported that Amanbay Orynbayev, chairman of the parliament of the Republic of Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan, said the region is building three cryptocurrency mining centers and three data centers with total investment of $5.11 billion.
In April, all of Karakalpakstan was designated as the special mining zone Besqala Mining Valley. Under Uzbek rules, cryptocurrency mining is allowed only for legal entities and should primarily use renewable energy. Power drawn from the national grid is charged at double the regular tariff. Licenses are issued by the National Agency of Perspective Projects.
Bits media also reported that Kazakhstan’s Ministry of AI and Digital Development said licensed miners and mining pools in the country produced about 7,200 BTC from the start of 2023 to May 2026. Output peaked in 2024 at about 3,400 BTC, then fell to 2,300 BTC in 2025 and 519.5 BTC in the first five months of 2026.
Kazakhstan currently has 78 licensed mining companies and more than 465,000 registered mining machines. Mining-related taxes from 2023 through 2025 totaled about 35 billion tenge, or about $75 million.
Bits media further reported that Russia will ban cryptocurrency mining in Moscow, the Moscow region and parts of the Kursk region starting Aug. 15, 2026. The ban will last through Dec. 31, 2032.
The restricted area includes eight municipal districts in Kursk and the city of Lgov, and it also applies to local residents participating in mining pools. The government order was signed by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.
Brazil power theft case and a mining machine smuggling case in China
Livecoins reported that Brazilian police found a suspected Bitcoin mining site running on stolen electricity inside a scrap recycling yard. Officers seized 15 ASIC miners and three servers, with the equipment valued at more than $39,400.
Local utility Cemig said the site was using an illegal power connection and estimated the losses at about $11,800 per month. A 37-year-old employee was arrested at the scene on suspicion of theft and receiving stolen goods after failing to explain the origin of the equipment or provide purchase documentation.
Police are now investigating where the mined cryptocurrency went, where the equipment came from and whether a criminal organization was involved.
According to an article by lawyer Shao Shiwei, a virtual currency mining machine smuggling case in Ningbo in July 2026 involved Liao and others bringing in miners including the Antminer L9 and IceRiver KS3 by false declarations and concealed disassembly. The amount involved exceeded 17 million yuan.
Core members were sentenced to fixed prison terms of three to seven years for smuggling goods and articles prohibited from import or export by the state. The article said the case may be the first publicly reported one in China to handle mining machine smuggling under that charge. Previous judicial practice more often treated such conduct as smuggling ordinary goods, suggesting the legal characterization remains disputed.
