
For the past year and a half, the loud whirring of tens of thousands of high-power computers filled a cavernous warehouse round-the-clock, contrasting sharply with the quiet forests of the Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in southwest China's Sichuan Province.
This computational arsenal belonged to a crypto mining farm, a facility crammed with specialized computers dedicated to solving complex math problems that keep the network running, and earning new bitcoin along the way.