Charter Planes and Bidding Wars: How Bitcoin Miners Raced to Beat Trump's Tariffs

WIRED

6 days ago

Aug 6, 2025 7:00 AM When US president Donald Trump announced sweeping tariff hikes in April, he set in motion a seven-day rush to bring goods into the country. Bitcoin miners elbowed their way to the front of the queue. Photo-Illustration:Twelve minutes after midnight on April 8, a Boeing 777-300ER barreled down a runway at Singapore Changi Airport. In its belly, it carried precious cargo: 3,000 kilograms of specialized bitcoin mining equipment bound urgently for New York.
As the plane took to the sky, staff at US-based Luxor Technology could begin to relax. The company, which trades bitcoin mining hardware and provides related software services, was importing the equipment on behalf of a client. The flight's departure from Singapore was the result of a seven-day scramble to arrange transport for the $1.3 million shipment.
A week earlier, on April 2, US president Donald Trump had announced sweeping tariff hikes on goods from 57 countries, effective April 9. Luxor says it had expected to pay a 2.6 percent import duty, but suddenly, its shipment—which originated in Indonesia—stood to incur a 32 percent levy amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
An untold number of businesses in all sorts of industries found themselves in the same position. Although Trump's tariff deadline has since been repeatedly delayed, most recently to August 7, the initial announcement set in motion an almighty scrap spanning practically every time zone and every link in the supply chain. To clear US customs before the April 9 deadline, importers fought over whose goods would be released earliest by manufacturers, trucks and barges to ferry cargo from warehouses to airports, passage through airport security, and limited airfreight capacity, sources say.
The sources that spoke to WIRED for this story largely declined to name their clients, suppliers, or supply chain partners for confidentiality reasons.
When the Luxor cargo left the tarmac in Singapore in time to make the cutoff, it felt to those that worked on the shipment like a narrow escape. 'It was kind of like one of those movies where you get on the plane and everyone starts clapping,' says Ethan Vera, chief operating officer at Luxor. 'The team was celebrating: The flight had taken off; the machines were on it.'
Tariff hikes are costly to all importers, but the US bitcoin mining industry is both particularly import-dependent and in the midst of a period of instability that already threatens to undermine profitability.
The bitcoin mining hardware market is an oligopoly dominated by two Chinese companies—Bitmain and MicroBT—which together account for an estimated 97 percent of sales. After the US imposed steep tariffs on Chinese goods during Trump's first term, those firms moved a proportion of manufacturing to Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. But under Trump's initial tariff announcement, these countries faced tariffs between 24 and 36 percent, too.
Meanwhile, a vicious combination of other factors—steep competition, a slump in transaction fees, diminishing bitcoin rewards, surging energy demand, and so on—have strangled margins for US-based mining companies.
Under these conditions, says Vera, the additional tariff cost threatens to undermine the economics of less well-capitalized bitcoin mining operations. 'On the high end, adding [more than 30 percent] to your capital expenditure really destroys unit economics for mining,' he says.
When Trump announced the hikes, mining companies whose pending hardware orders were not yet ready for collection had no choice but to brace for the additional cost or place shipments on hold in the hope that negotiations between the US and its trading partners might yield less punitive rates. But for companies whose machines stood ready, the race against the clock began.
On April 2, Vera was sitting in a hospital unit in Uruguay, he says, an IV bag feeding painkillers into his system, after damaging a knee ligament playing soccer earlier in the day. Simultaneously, he says, he was taking a work call.
Vera and two other Luxor staff members—Lauren Lin, head of hardware, and Nicole Caldwell, head of shipping—convened in a virtual 'war room' to form a response to the tariffs and divide up the most urgent tasks.
'I didn't even know it was possible to raise tariffs in, like, a two-day period,' says Vera. 'It's really hard to conduct business like that—to have confidence investing in a system that can change rules that fast.'
Soon, Lin had identified two Luxor shipments ready for collection: the $1.3 million order from Indonesia and, for a separate client, a $12 million order split between warehouses in Malaysia and Thailand. If the company could ferry the shipments through US customs before April 5, it would sidestep all tariff hikes; and failing that, if it could beat the April 9 deadline, the shipments would be subject to a blanket 10 percent import duty instead of the full proposed rates. 'It was a very urgent situation,' says Lin.
Typical of global supply chains, whose elaborate theater is normally concealed from view, transporting bitcoin mining hardware across the world involves many steps and requires coordination between many parties. After manufacturing, hardware is usually held at the factory or a third-party warehouse. From there, a freight forwarding company hired by the importer can arrange delivery of the machines by barge, truck, or plane to the nearest international airport. The freight forwarder would then strike a price with an air carrier to ferry the cargo to its final destination, with the importer's approval. Once the cargo begins the final leg of its journey, the importer may begin the customs process before ultimately releasing the hardware to the end buyer: the bitcoin mining company.
It takes time for mining machines to make their way through this funnel, particularly during a period of heightened demand. 'It's all very finely tuned,' says Christopher Berschel, president at freight forwarding company Sealion Cargo, whose clients include multiple bitcoin mining hardware importers. 'The minute you have a disruption or a peak in demand, you find that there are not enough trucks, not enough space in terminals, not enough aircraft, not enough people to unload the aircraft.'
But in April, importers found themselves with just days to play with. 'There was this very clear tariff clock—the deadline whereby landing one hour or taking off one hour later just made a massive difference,' says Berschel. 'That's unique.'
For companies importing goods from Southeast Asia, like Luxor, the timing of Trump's announcement was particularly unhelpful, coinciding with Eid, the public holiday celebrated at the end of Ramadan. Initially, Luxor's attempts to arrange collection went unanswered. In some cases, says Berschel, 'factories had lines of trucks in front of them.' But eventually, in light of the circumstances, the warehouse agreed to prepare the hardware shipment.
'We had to call a lot of people on the supply chain side to allow us to pick up,' says Lin. To arrange a collection at a few days' notice, in the middle of a public holiday, would normally be 'almost impossible,' she says. 'That never happened before this news broke.'
On April 3, Luxor began to bid for a charter plane for the $12 million order, which was large enough to fill a jet. Lin set up camp at the client's office, so she could directly relay messages from the freight forwarder, which was negotiating with air carriers.
As the day progressed, the quotes for charter planes continued to rise. Each time Luxor's client lodged a bid, another party came in over the top, and the negotiation cycle started over. 'We had a very short window to make a decision. I don't think it's the norm to need to make a multimillion-dollar decision within such a short time window,' says Lin.
By midnight, Lin had ironed out a final $1.76 million bid, she says. But by the morning of April 4, she claims, the bid had been gazumped—prices had risen to $3.5 million. According to Sealion Cargo, prices for some types of air freight peaked at 10 times the regular rate in the first week of April.
Luxor and its client gave up on the plan to charter a plane.
Meanwhile, at the cargo terminals of some major airports in Southeast Asia, things had begun to unravel.
'It was absolute chaos,' says Berschel, who traveled to Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore to monitor the progress of shipments. 'There was so much cargo at the terminals, to actually get cargo through the terminals, through the x-ray scanners, and by the side of the aircraft was a challenge in itself,' he says.
At Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, Berschel recalls, the buildup of pallets had created a logjam. With little available dock space, truckers were hauling boxes from their vehicles toward the airport terminal. Police officers were on hand to control the swelling crowds. 'It was kind of like a concert, but a concert for cargo,' says Berschel.
In the disorder, even importers that had managed to secure passage on departing planes risked missing the opportunity to load their cargo as they struggled to get it past the logjam to the aircraft. 'The chance of missing an aircraft, missing a loading window,' says Berschel. 'There were so many situations where we were down to literally minutes.'
Airports of Thailand, which manages Suvarnabhumi Airport, did not respond to a request for comment.
On April 8, Vlad Siniavsky sat in his office in Montreal awaiting the arrival of his final pieces of cargo and calculating how much money he had lost. Siniavsky is the founder of AsicXchange, another bitcoin mining hardware trading company caught in the tariff scramble.
AsicXchange claims to have ended up paying $800,000 in shipping costs—more than three times the regular amount, according to Siniavsky—to fly $6 million worth of bitcoin mining hardware into the US before the April 9 deadline. The company had split around 60 pallets of equipment across planes departing from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. The bidding process, says Siniavsky, 'was just a free-for-all.'
To avoid denting its relationship with the bitcoin mining company purchasing the machines, AsicXchange agreed to cover the uplift in shipping costs, which meant taking a $100,000 loss on the deal. 'A lot of money was lost in the company because of this situation,' says Siniavsky.
Luxor was not required to bear the additional shipping and tariff costs associated with the $12 million order—which eventually arrived in the US in batches across April and May—under the terms of its sales agreement. But the company did cover the much-elevated cost to ship the separate $1.3 million order from Singapore. 'It ended up costing us a lot of money, obviously,' says Vera.
As it turned out, importers had wasted their efforts. On April 9, Trump announced a 90-day pause on the tariff hikes, which have since been delayed a further two times. The president's equivocations have given rise to a joke at his expense: TACO, short for Trump always chickens out.
The new tariff regime is set to take effect on August 7. Under the latest rates, outlined in an executive order on July 31, imports from Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia are set to incur a 19 percent import duty—slightly lower than previously threatened.
Ahead of the August 7 deadline, there has been almost none of the chaos that reigned in the period after the initial tariff announcement, sources say, because importers have had plenty of time to bring goods into the country piecemeal. 'At the time, [the system] wasn't ready for it … Everyone kind of got caught off-guard,' says Vera. 'There's more preparedness now, in terms of pushing over shipping lanes and getting aircraft to Southeast Asia.'
Among importers, the satisfaction at having overcome the thorny logistics and outrun the deadline is cut with resentment at having been forced to pay over the odds and suffer the unnecessary strain. 'It was probably one of the most stressful things in my career,' says Siniavsky.
'We're super proud of what we did,' says Berschel. But 'in the end, that was all for naught.'