A Chinese-owned Bitcoin mine is being kicked of its land in Wyoming following an order from President Biden. The administration has given the miner and its partners 120 days to sell the land they operate on due to spying concerns.
Land purchases in the U.S. from Chinese companies are “absolutely going up,” Anita Nikolich, head researcher of technology innovation at the University of Illinois, told Fortune. As a result, 33 states introduced 81 bills last year attempting to curtail foreign purchases of land, according to reporting by the Washington Post. Nikolich says the order against the Wyoming operation isn’t specifically an attack on Bitcoin miners but rather part of a bigger picture: There are “many recent indicators of adversarial activity” in critical infrastructure, and foreign purchases of land near such infrastructure, that the Biden administration “can’t ignore.”