Crypto mining represents an on-going growing opportunity for chip manufactures, mining operations continue to compete by making faster chips. Two China-based mining hardware giants, Bitmain and Canaan are currently engaged in an ASIC chip race. According to industrial news, Canaan will roll out ASICs based on TSMC’s 7nm process in July, which may be slightly ahead of Bitmain.

Canaan Creative, the bitcoin mining chip maker ranks only second to Bitmain, is transforming its 16nm ASICs straight to 7nm chips. The company is also plans to enter mass production of this brand new 7nm semiconductor chips in July 2018. in the use of advanced process, Canaan is faster than its top competitor Bitmain. Nevertheless, this news has not been confirmed by TSMC yet.

Canaan Creative was found by Zhang Nangeng (N.G Zhang) in 2013. Canaan’s annual net profit increased 125 times in two years. The company received a Series A of 300 million RMB ($43 million USD) in May 2017. After that, Canaan worth 3.3 billion CNY.

TSMC’s 7nm process may improve the performance and reduce the power consumption of mining machine. Canaan has been developing 7nm chips to make their miners more competitive. It was also reported that Canaan has plans to enter the Artificial Intelligence (AI) market. Which coincidently chooses the same development strategy as Bitmain.

Bitmain is also attempting to roll out 7nm chips in the second half of this year. According to Economic Daily, Zhan Ketuan, co-founder of Bitmain went to Taiwan last week to visit TSMC, Powerchip and other suppliers in order to discuss their cooperation in the new generation of high-performance mining chips, as well as further development after Bitmain’s AI transformations.

Bitmain has contracted the total production capacity of the Nanjing Fab of TSMC. The company will roll out a variety of ASICs based on TSMC 10nm and 7nm process in the 2nd half of this year. The company is also working on AI chips: sophon. It was also reported that Bitmain has become China’s second largest IC design company ,ranked only second to Hisilicon.