Within a month, the bitcoin rate broke several records and managed to sag several times. Such dynamics pushed those who are engaged in the extraction of this cryptocurrency to purchase more ASIC miners. But the companies that manufacture them are unable to meet the increased demand, including due to the fact that semiconductor suppliers cannot provide them with the required number of chips.

“We just don’t have enough chips to support the production of mining rigs,” says Alex Ao, vice president of Innosilicon, one of the largest ASIC miner manufacturers.

The main reason is that companies like Innosilicon make their products at TSMC and Samsung Electronics factories. However, because of this, TSMC and Samsung began to have problems shipping chips for computers, smartphones, electric vehicles and consumer electronics, which are more profitable than ASIC chips, they decided to focus on the consumer sector, displacing the ASIC miner manufacturers to the second plan.

As noted by Reuters, amid a shortage of Bitcoin mining rigs, their value in the secondary market increased by 60%. On average, used options now start at $ 5,000.

A little explanation: ASIC miners are special devices based on special-purpose integrated circuits that are thousands of times more powerful than conventional computers for certain operations and are focused on decoding the blockchain, mining blocks, and so on. In general, they are made specifically for the tasks for which cryptocurrency systems provide rewards.