President Biden on Monday ordered a company with Chinese origins to shut down and sell the Wyoming cryptocurrency mine it built a mile from an Air Force base that controls nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The cryptomining facility, which operates high-powered computers in a data center near the F.E.
Warren base in Cheyenne, “presents a national security risk to the United States,” the president said in an executive order, because its equipment could be used for surveillance and espionage.
The order did not detail those risks.
But Microsoft’s report to the federal committee, obtained last year by The Times, said, “We suggest the possibility that the computing power of an industrial-level cryptomining operation, along with the presence of an unidentified number of Chinese nationals in direct proximity to Microsoft’s Data Center and one of three strategic-missile bases in the U.S., provides significant threat vectors.”
Persons:
Biden, Warren, “
Organizations:
Monday, Air Force, New York Times, Microsoft, Pentagon, Foreign Investment, The Times, Microsoft’s Data
Locations:
Wyoming, Cheyenne, United States, U.S