The Inside Story of Eric Trump’s American Bitcoin

“Going public is a game-changer: it unlocks capital and institutional access that will fuel our mission to build the largest, most investable platform for long-term Bitcoin accumulation,” Eric said.

Hut 8, however, is providing the infrastructure. ABTC pays Hut 8 for energy, operations, and shared services, which include “accounting…HR support, payroll, benefits, IT support,” and legal services, per its SEC filing. While Hut 8 provides ABTC’s mining facilities—currently in Niagara Falls, New York; Medicine Hat, Alberta; and Orla, Texas—it can use the company to raise and deploy “massive capital,” says Prusak, that won’t “strain Hut 8’s balance sheet.” With American Bitcoin taking care of mining, Hut 8 can focus on supporting growing technologies like AI and going after the business of “hyperscalers,” says Foxley—companies like Meta and Google that need massive data centers for their energy-heavy operations.

Since Hut 8 is bankrolling the data centers, American Bitcoin just needs to buy its mining machines. It inherited an agreement from Hut 8 subsidiary Zephyr to buy around 17,280 Bitmain U3S21EXPH miners for a maximum of $320 million. As of May 31, American Bitcoin reported owning more than 60,000 bitcoin miners, made up mostly of Bitmain Antminer S21+ series miners (Glennan calls the miners “Cadillac…not the Ferrari”) and China-based MicroBt M5X and M6X series machines.

While the US boasts between 30 and 40 percent of the world’s bitcoin mining, 90 percent of mining hardware comes from China. “Bitcoin is becoming more and more central to the US financial ecosystem,” says Sanjay Gupta, chief strategy officer at Auradine, a US-based rival to Chinese bitcoin mining suppliers. As President Trump works to further cement bitcoin’s role in that ecosystem, experts caution that security risks could arise from connecting Chinese hardware to critical US power infrastructure. Bitmain, for instance, is a privately listed company with links to the AI company Sophgo, which the US government blacklisted for security reasons.(Bitmain, which shares a co-founder with Sophgo, has not been added to the Entity List.)

Bitcoin mining businesses must navigate deteriorating economics: They rely on a volatile asset, and rewards for miners halve roughly every four years, as more than 19 million of the total 21 million bitcoin have been mined.

Glennan says maintaining minimal debt and hedging through bitcoin’s derivative market will help American Bitcoin “survive the ups and downs.” ABTC also aims to increase its computational power to mine more profitably. That could mean replacing older equipment with newer, more efficient models and acquiring other bitcoin mining companies.

This takes capital, which the company hopes the Trumps’ name will attract. As much as Hut 8 and American Bitcoin representatives claim separation between their business and the Trumps’ political connections, the company couldn’t help but flaunt these ties during the May 2025 Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas. There, American Bitcoin threw an event that the Winklevoss twins, who each donated $1 million to Trump pre-election, and chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald Brandon Lutnick, son of Trump’s secretary of commerce Howard Lutnick, attended.

On a stage that had hosted Vice President J.D. Vance hours earlier, during a panel with Prusak, Ho, and his brother, Donald Jr. told the conservative-leaning crowd, “My father made a lot of promises to the…bitcoin community…[Eric and I] show our true level of commitment when you look at all the things we're doing in this space.” He named American Bitcoin first.