The announcement came via Bitdeer's March 2026 production and operations update, released April 15. If the self-reported number holds up against peer disclosures, it would represent the highest declared self-mining hashrate among listed miners globally. For context, a single exahash equals one quintillion hash computations per second, and total output directly determines a miner's share of block rewards on the Bitcoin network.

Bitdeer's 70 EH/s figure is unaudited and self-reported, as are the monthly operational updates published by most major public miners. Independent on-chain attribution is difficult because the company distributes its mining activity across multiple pools. The competitive ranking should be read with that caveat in mind.

Bitdeer was founded by Jihan Wu, who co-founded Bitmain, for years the dominant bitcoin mining chip manufacturer. That lineage helps explain why the company's vertical integration strategy carries weight: Wu built the industry's supply chain before building a miner on top of it.

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A Near-Vertical Growth Curve

The year-over-year jump is striking.

Bitdeer recorded roughly 11.5 EH/s in March 2025. Twelve months later, that figure had grown more than fivefold. As recently as May 2025, the company was operating at just 13.6 EH/s, meaning it effectively quintupled output in under ten months.

"Bitcoin mining operations achieved approximately 70 EH/s, a 504% increase year over year," said Matt Kong, Bitdeer's Chief Business Officer, attributing the result to "operational excellence and disciplined vertical integration strategy execution," according to Bitdeer's March 2026 operations release.

The company mined 661 BTC in March 2026, up 480% from roughly 115 BTC in March 2025. Bitdeer held 331 BTC on its balance sheet as of March 31, excluding any customer deposits. Its total hashrate under management, which includes third-party hosted machines alongside its own fleet of 225,000 deployed rigs, reached 78.1 EH/s.

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Where the Hashrate Comes From: Bhutan at the Center

Among Bitdeer's globally distributed facilities, the largest single site sits in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, a landlocked nation of fewer than 800,000 people.

The company operates a 500-megawatt facility in Jigmeling, Sarpang, built in partnership with Druk Holding and Investments, the Bhutanese sovereign wealth vehicle.

A second site in Gedu adds 100 MW, giving Bitdeer a 600 MW footprint in the country.

The Jigmeling mine runs on Bhutan's hydropower grid and is estimated to produce roughly 9 to 10 BTC per day at full capacity. Bhutan's state-linked bitcoin mining operations have reportedly generated over one billion dollars cumulatively, making the sector a meaningful sovereign revenue source for a country with limited export options.

The Bhutanese model is being watched closely in the region. India has begun cautiously re-examining crypto mining as a foreign exchange earner. Nepal, which also holds significant hydropower potential, faces ongoing energy policy uncertainty that has so far limited similar moves.

Bitdeer also operates a 40 to 50 MW facility in Ethiopia's Oromia region, one of the company's smaller sites. As of January 2026, Ethiopia accounted for an estimated 2.6% of global network hashrate, or roughly 27.5 EH/s, powered largely by surplus capacity from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Africa as a whole currently represents approximately 3 to 4% of global network hashrate, with projections pointing toward 6 to 8% by end-2026 as new capacity comes online across Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kenya's VASP Act has already established a regulatory framework that is drawing additional investment to the continent.

The Oromia location carries elevated operational risk: the region has experienced ongoing civil conflict, a variable that distinguishes the Ethiopian deployment from more stable sites such as Bhutan.

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Hardware as a Strategic Lever

Bitdeer's hashrate growth is partly a function of its in-house chip design program. On April 7, just eight days before this announcement, the company launched its SEALMINER A4 series, powered by proprietary SEAL04 chips at 9.45 joules per terahash. That compares to 12.5 J/TH for its previous A3 generation, a roughly 24% efficiency improvement.

Efficiency per joule matters most where electricity is expensive or supply is constrained. According to CoinShares data, Bitdeer's own all-in cost per bitcoin mined was approximately $118,188 in Q4 2025. For comparison, the CoinShares-reported weighted average cash cost across public miners was approximately $79,995 per BTC in the same period. Both figures sit against a hash price (revenue per unit of compute) near post-halving lows of $28 to $30 per petahash per day in Q1 2026.

Miners running older, less efficient hardware above $0.06 per kilowatt-hour face losses at those rates.

For now, Bitdeer's A4 hardware is deployed internally rather than sold commercially, meaning the efficiency gains flow to Bitdeer itself rather than to smaller operators in emerging markets where electricity costs and hardware access remain major barriers.

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Network Context and What Comes Next

Bitdeer's 70 EH/s represents an estimated 6.5 to 6.9% of the global Bitcoin network, which CoinShares measured at approximately 1,020 EH/s during Q1 2026. The network crossed one zettahash per second for the first time in August 2025 and peaked near 1,160 EH/s in October before settling lower.

Mining difficulty, which adjusts roughly every two weeks to keep block times near ten minutes, is currently trending down toward 133.62 trillion after hitting a record 144.4 trillion in February 2026. That February peak represented the largest absolute increase in Bitcoin history and the biggest percentage jump since China's 2021 mining ban, a benchmark that underscores how much compute joined the network in a short period.

Bitdeer's AI infrastructure business is also expanding faster than its mining side on a percentage basis. Kong reported approximately $43 million in annualized recurring revenue from AI cloud services, a 105% month-over-month increase, with GPU utilization at 94% across 2,128 units spanning Nvidia H100, H200, B200, and GB200 models. That utilization figure stood at just 41% in January 2026, meaning the company nearly doubled its GPU fill rate in two months.

The company holds 3.0 GW of global energy capacity, and the direction of travel points toward data centers that serve both mining and AI workloads simultaneously. Whether that dual-use model reshapes Bitdeer's geographic footprint further, particularly in regions where it already has physical infrastructure, will be a key variable to watch through the rest of 2026.