A company with just five core employees has done something deeply counterintuitive.

In late February, the crypto mining company ABTC delivered a brutal earnings report: dragged down by Bitcoin’s plunge, it booked $227 million in full-year impairment charges, posted a net loss of $153 million, and saw its share price fall to $1, down nearly 90%.

Yet it bought 11,000 top-spec mining rigs in one sweep and even restarted an old mining farm in Canada that had been idle for two years.

Its confidence sits in the shareholder register: the Trump family owns 20%, and the former president’s second and eldest sons are co-founders.

As retail investors stampeded for the exits after the bubble burst, this tiny company wrapped in a political halo was buying aggressively against the market.

What interests are really being calculated behind it?

Drumheller: A Mining Farm Killed by Power Costs and Revived by New Mining Rigs

As early as January 2026, a local newspaper photographed construction restarting at the abandoned Drumheller mining farm site.

The answer did not arrive until a March 3 announcement: the old mining farm was being restarted, and the operator was ABTC, or American Bitcoin, a subsidiary of Hut 8.

In the crypto mining world, Drumheller is no prized site.

In 2024, Hut 8 took a hard hit there.

At the time, the site produced just 1.4% of the company’s Bitcoin while consuming 11% of its computing power. Power costs were high, the base voltage was unstable, and the economics were badly upside down.

With few options, Hut 8 moved out the good machines, scrapped the bad ones, and left behind only an empty lease.

The CEO said at the time that the site would restart when power prices fell.

Nearly two years later, however, local electricity prices in 2025 were still elevated at around 12 cents per kilowatt-hour.

If power had become even more expensive, why would ABTC jump into the fire?

Because the electricity had not changed, but the “shovels” used for crypto mining had.

This time, ABTC brought in the latest S21 XP mining rigs. Using the same amount of electricity, the new machines can mine nearly three times as many coins.

As ABTC executives put it, as long as the new machines are powerful enough, higher output can spread the costs and push the mining cost of each coin below the spot market price. On paper, that works.

But in a market where the stock has fallen 90%, continuing to bet on heavy-asset expansion still takes real nerve.

Behind this “countercyclical increase” is a bet on Bitcoin’s long-term value, and a vote of confidence in the Trump family’s political resources.

The Trump Family’s Capital Game: From a Pizza Meeting to a Stock Collapse

The birth of American Bitcoin, or ABTC, was a capital marriage between political IP and mining assets.

In March 2025, Hut 8 injected mining rigs into the new company in exchange for an 80% stake, while the Trump family took the remaining 20% through its brand influence and political resources. The new company was named American Bitcoin.

ABTC said Eric Trump brought “business acumen” and a “commitment to a decentralized financial system.” In September 2025, ABTC went public through a backdoor listing.

With top-tier political IP behind it, the market frenzy once pushed the value of that 20% stake to $1.4 billion.

But the celebration quickly ran into reality.

From October 2025 to February 2026, Bitcoin fell from a record high of $120,000 to the $70,000 range.

ABTC’s stock went into free fall, and the Trump family’s paper wealth shrank by more than 90% from its peak.

But they did not back down. They still tightly hold 6,000 Bitcoin worth more than $400 million.

Their reasoning is that “the cost of mining it ourselves is much cheaper than buying it directly in the market. We are going to keep stockpiling.” That also explains why ABTC made a high-profile announcement on March 3 that it would expand the Drumheller mining farm.

When a top political family is deeply involved, taking equity through an operating company, financing itself through political resources, and expanding against the cycle to hoard coins, this is no longer a simple crypto mining business. It is a power game deeply tied to U.S. politics.

Five Employees, 89,242 Mining Rigs and an Ethics Storm

ABTC’s money-making logic can be reduced to one sentence: the Trump family contributes the IP, Hut 8 contributes the mining rigs and operations, and the two sides split the proceeds.

The company has only five formal employees. It does not build facilities or run operations itself; all 89,000 mining rigs are hosted in Hut 8’s machine rooms.

It is a crypto mining company that barely mines for itself.

But the business is now under pressure from both politics and the market.

On the political side, a House investigation report said the Trump family pulled in more than $1.4 billion from crypto projects including ABTC in less than a year.

Although Eric, Trump’s second son, insists there is a “firewall” between father and son, that thin veil was pierced last year when Indonesia’s president asked to meet with Eric and Trump immediately replied, “I’ll have Eric call you.”

On the business side, while peers have been shifting toward AI data centers to hedge their risk, ABTC has doubled down on “pure crypto mining plus permanent coin hoarding.”

The cost of betting its fate entirely on token prices was a full-year 2025 net loss of $153 million.

Faced with heavy losses, Eric has his own answer. He no longer talks about making money, but repackages crypto mining as a “national energy strategy.”

A money-losing business has been dressed in the policy language of Trump’s “strategic Bitcoin reserve,” transforming it into a form of untouchable “political correctness.”

The Drumheller mining farm, once shut down because high power prices made it uneconomical, will soon be roaring again.

This time, the site will deploy 11,298 top-spec mining rigs, adding 3.05 EH/s of computing power.

Are the Trump family and ABTC making a shrewd countercyclical move, or using political resources to wage a high-risk capital gamble? Perhaps only Bitcoin’s next move can answer that.