It is now April 2029, the tenth anniversary of SAI. The price of Bitcoin has exceeded $5 million per unit, and Bitcoin’s market value has exceeded $100 trillion, making it the world’s largest ecological economy integrating energy, technology, and finance. Just yesterday, SAI, the world’s largest computing and energy operator, also surpassed $5 trillion in market value, which exceeded Standard Oil in its heyday in 1914 (taking inflation into account). It became the company with the highest listed value in human history. Taking this opportunity, I have compiled the major milestones in the development of the past ten years to remember the past and look forward to the future!
I. Founding (2018–2019)
【2018】Idea to Demo
In June 2018, my partner Tao Zhang and I had our company registered successfully. Before that, we had fully researched the economic logic of Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining, hoping that with our resources and judgment, more people could understand and participate in this industry. In July, while reading Satoshi Nakamoto’s reply in Bitcoin.org, I saw this interesting content.
“Bitcoin mining will eventually be widespread in the lowest-cost scenarios, perhaps in those harsh environments where electricity is used to obtain heat, because the cost of mining in those places is essentially zero.”
— Satoshi Nakamoto on August 9, 2010
At that time, At that time, I was struggling with the problem of shutting down the mining machine under the environment of the currency price drop. The mainstream model in the whole market is Bitmain’s Antminer S9 series, which were based on 16nm ASIC chip, with a single machine power consumption of 1.5kw and heat generation equivalent to a 1.5P air conditioner, relying on air cooling to dissipate a large amount of energy. Although I took a break from Zhejiang University in my junior year to start my own business, I still maintained my professional sensitivity by majoring in energy and environmental system engineering, and started to study liquid cooling and waste heat utilization solutions for mining machines, and I believed that a breakthrough point would be found here.
After continuous exploration, we finally verified the feasibility of our idea with a single prototype in the winter. At this time, the market had entered the bottom of the most difficult bear market. By the end of December, the Bitcoin price had fallen from nearly $20,000 in the 17-year bull market to over $3,000, a drop of nearly 85%, and some miners were forced to shut down their machines. The whole market fell into a dead silence, and some people sold their mining machines as scrap metal, while I was ambitious and started preparing for a bigger plan.
【2019】Energy as a Service
In March 2019, six months after the project was launched for internal testing, we formally registered the company in Haidian District, Beijing named “SAI”, the name came from the second law of thermodynamics, which meant that the future products and services of the company could surpass the bottleneck of entropy and heat. In April, we received a seed round invested by Sun Zeyu of Chuangshi Capital and formally started the development of the first generation of products, and our team was growing, with Tao Zhang, Dahan Bao, LieDong Wang and Yunfeng Liu supporting our four business modules of SAIBANK , SAIBYTE, SAIWATT and SAIHEAT respectively. In the fall of the same year, we officially started the small-scale internal testing of SAIHUB series liquid cooling cabinets to make the final attack preparation for the large-scale undertaking of business in the following year. By the end of the year, the products were basically running stably and had the initial technical support capability for Energy as a service business, which also meant that we could officially start to undertake the computing power hosting business.
The whole market was very difficult this year. The leading mining machine manufacturers and exchanges had to lay off a large number of employees and the cash was in shortage. While we were making progress in technology and products, the capital market was also in a cold winter. Since a new round of financing was not yet in place, I had to take out all my savings to pay the company’s salaries, and several partners also took the initiative not to take the salary, and we used all the money to keep the R&D. Near the end of the year, I had just been discharged from the hospital after my second week of surgery for a comminuted elbow fracture. I hung a bandage in my left hand and drove with my right hand, enduring the constant pain caused by eight steel nails, two steel plates and more than 30 stitches of sutures, and came to Bitmain’s office alone to start a formal communication with a new round of financing. At that time, I was in debt and had no idea if my partners’ salary would be paid out after the Spring Festival ……
II. The First Three-Year Plan — SAIBYTE Computing Power Acceleration (2020–2022)
【2020】Facility as a service
The year 2020 started with the COVID-19 that swept the world, the economies of various countries came to a standstill. The US stock plunged from 29,000 points to 18,000. Bitcoin fell from $9,000 to $3,800, and crude oil futures fell to negative values. Under such a harsh environment, SAI bucked the trend and successively received an angel round strategic investment from Bitmain, as well as Pre-A round of financing from Zhuiyuan Capital, Jiayin Capital, Kaimai Capital and Amino Capital. During the second half of the year, the U.S.-China trade war intensified and the U.S. presidential election gained worldwide attention. The predictions I made in my article “Bitcoin Price, Dow Jones Index and U.S. Presidency” in February, 2010 all came true. Based on my analysis in “Re-discussing Bitcoin: The Block Theory and Leverage Theory of Wealth”, I was even more convinced that Bitcoin, as a decentralized asset block, was a better value storage carrier, and I hoped the company’s products could serve the real life of human beings to help create more value for everyone.
In the second half of the year, the U.S. crypto asset trading market began to heat up steeply. Grayscale Fund held more than 500,000 BTCs. Paypal supported users to directly purchase digital assets. The listed company Microstrategy holds more than 50,000 BTC, and its stock had soared. The U.S. were focusing all its efforts on mastering the secondary trading market of crypto assets.
As we continued to increase our R&D investment, the second generation of computing and energy cabinet products had been successfully mass-produced. Even though the places were closed for management from time to time due to the COVID-19, we had overcome all the difficulties and successfully built and operated the world’s largest liquid-cooled ASIC supercomputing center, which was also the largest computing waste heat utilization project in the world. So far, we had achieved a full customization and upgrade of our computing infrastructure, and we had a leading edge in the “Facility as a service” dimension. We had achieved tens of millions of revenue and millions of net profit in just 4 months.
[2021] Cloud as a service
In January 2021, Bitcoin quickly stood at $40,000 to officially announce the start of a new bull market. Orders from mining machine manufacturers were already lined up until the end of the year, making it hard to find a machine on the market. Different from the past, the current bull market had become fully institutionalized. Bitcoin had taken ten years to go through the nearly 100-year history of the U.S. stock market, and the emotional retail investors had become history. The new president of the United States took office, and the Democratic Party took full control of the US government. It officially announced the beginning of a new round of the USD quantitative easing policy. Holders of USD assets all over the world were in depreciation panic. Bitcoin had become a safe haven for various institutions. The price of Bitcoin exceeded 100,000 USD and the market value exceeded 2 trillion USD. Bitcoin surpassed Saudi Aramco and Apple to become the world’s second largest asset body after gold.
SAI had firmly grasped the market acceleration and became the leader in the crypto asset energy service track based on its own computing power, electricity and heat technology advantages, and was on par with the leading companies in the two major tracks of crypto asset chip service and trading service. “Cloud” was the center of our business this year, and our SAI.PLUS product had become the computing power version of “Grayscale Fund”, which helped global institutions to allocate computing power assets quickly. During this year, SAI had completed our round A and round B funding and successfully landed on NASDAQ. Based on our technology and resource advantages, we had achieved exponential growth and quickly became the highest market capitalization computing technology company on NASDAQ. The hash scale managed by us was over 10E and our market value exceeded $5B by the end of the year. We also surpassed CenturyLink to become the largest third-party computing infrastructure services company in China.
[2022] Chip as a Service
In 2022, Bitcoin reached the peak of the bull market. The price exceed $200,000. The total market value was about 30% of gold. This year, global capital had adopted Bitcoin as one of the important asset allocation methods. The Bitcoin reserves of many small countries had already exceeded gold. China was still the world’s largest computing power area and the entire Asia had 85% of the world’s crypto asset computing power infrastructure.
SAI’s SAI.PLUS service managed hash scale over 20E, which had reached 1/2 the size of the Grayscale Fund in its managed assets, and SAI’s market value exceeded $20B. In this year, we became the top three global mining machine buyers, cumulatively purchased 25% of the miners produced worldwide that year. The top mining machine manufacturers provided us with chip customization services. Based on the 5nm chip which was designed by our new generation computing and energy center had the world’s lowest power consumption ratio and strongest performance. We had officially entered the chip service track.
The successful completion of the first three-year plan marked SAI as the world’s largest computing power technology company. We could provide more cost-effective computing power services to the world and meant a big step forward from the vision of becoming the world’s largest computing and energy operator.
III. Second Three-Year Plan — SAIWATT Power Consolidation (2023–2025)
【2023】Heating power for mining
As we enter 2023, Bitcoin had already gone through the last round of bull market, and had not seen a significant drop of 85% or more like the previous retail-driven bear market. The Bitcoin price was oscillating at $50,000-$100,000, and the market value continued to maintain $1-$2 trillion, which positioned firmly among the top five asset entities in the world by market capitalization. In the computing power market, over 40% of the global institutions added new allocation of computing power assets would choose us as an operational service provider. As Bitcoin would be halved again in the second year, The entire computing power market was caught in concerns about the further decline in the price of the coin and the halving of the output, which would lead to the shutdown of mining machines, especially for models with power consumption ratios around 50W/T. In the current computing power and coin price situation, once the production was halved, it would inevitably shut down.
In this situation, SAI’s strategic advantage was once again highlighted against the trend. We could effectively collect the heat from the miners to provide large-scale heating services, which significantly reduced power costs and shutdown risks. After 5 years of pioneering, we had served more than 24 million square meters of heating area at home and abroad by means of chip waste heat heating. Thus, we could still maintain amazing growth in the bear market, and our originally accumulated computing power customers fully enjoied our technology dividend and obtained higher return on investment returns and safety margins than similar models in the market. About 20E hash scale in the entire stock market was also successfully converted into our customers during the year due to the risk of shutdown. We accumulated more than 40E hash scale under management at the end of the year, which accounted for about 12% of the total global computing power.
We had also became the world’s largest clean heating technology company by leveraging our chip waste heat heating technology and the scale of our computing power management. We integrated and optimizied major domestic heat service companies through downscaling advantages, which made us have reserved more than 200 million square meters of heating area, and the available heat load exceeded 10 million kw. We were also fully committed to serving the China-led global carbon neutrality program, and helped domestic and overseas customers to quickly realize the transformation of the heat industry from coal to electricity.
Due to the overall cooling of the computing power market and he higher cost of 5nm chips and other multiple factors. The dismal sales of mining machine manufacturers were facing the crisis of another layoff or even a break in the capital chain. Based on the joint R&D experience with chip manufacturers, SAI had acquired the most technologically advanced mining machine R&D manufacturer in the market, and had made a strategic layout for the next step of development.
[2024] Clean power for mining
In 2024, Bitcoin would be halved for the fourth time, and the US presidential election was coming up on schedule. As of the day of Bitcoin halving in 2024, of the total supply of about 21 million Bitcoins, 19,867,500 BTC had been mined. In the next four years, 656,250 Bitcoins would be mined. So by 2028, only about 650,000 Bitcoins would be left to be mined over the next 100 years, which made Bitcoin increasingly scarce. With the steady recovery of the crypto price, large institutions had taken the lead and started to enter the layout of crypto assets. Giants such as Apple, Microsoft and Google had announced Bitcoin as part of their corporate strategic investments and reserves, and the application scenarios for crypto assets were in full swing. Driven by huge funds, the price of Bitcoin had once again returned to $150,000 with a market value of over $3 trillion, ranking steadily as the second largest asset body in the world after gold.
SAI also officially launched a new type of computing and energy chip based on SMIC’s 5nm process after Bitcoin was halved, mainly for self-built computing power to serve global customers.
China’s 14th Five-Year Plan, the China-Europe Investment Agreement and the U.S. Democratic Party had all entered their fourth year in office, and the common focus of all three must be clean energy. The proportion of clean electricity such as hydroelectricity, wind electricity and photovoltaic electricity in the total global power generation had reached a new high, which brought a huge strategic opportunity for SAI.
On the one hand, as the proportion of clean power generation increased, the periodic problem of power consumption and peaking became increasingly serious. Due to the technical advantage of crypto computing power was not limited by geographical location, our computing and energy center could solve the problem of clean power consumption nearby, without the need to invest in expensive energy storage facilities or transmission facilities. Thus, we began to cooperate with a large number of global clean power companies to provide power consumption business based on distributed computing energy center, and in this way, we had obtained more globally distributed clean and affordable sustainable power resources.
On the other hand, with the development of new energy vehicles and clean power, the plight of traditional energy sources was becoming more and more apparent, especially in countries that were highly dependent on oil and gas exports and faced the huge potential for long-term economic decline. SAI was responsible for the full utilization of electricity resources, reducing the cost of transportation and increasing the added value of the resources. With the rising market value of Bitcoin and SAI’s integration advantage in the whole industry chain of computing power, together with these energy exporting countries’ own concerns about the devaluation of USD assets and economic and financial security. Global energy giants had entered into joint operation agreements with SAI: SAI provided chip-server-cabinet-computing and energy center as a whole product, based on the energy owners’ power resources. large-scale computing power operations were carried out in Central Asia, the Middle East, Russia, Canada and other places. To this end, referring to the OPEC organization in the oil industry era, SAI hds established OSEC (Organization of Supercomputing and Energy Cooperation) in collaboration with energy giants, aiming to jointly maintain the stability of the crypto asset computing power system and the security of the trading system through cooperation.
[2025] Solar power for mining
With the entry of large financial institutions, technology giants, and energy giants, the new term of the US president had launched an unprecedented economic stimulus plan. The price of Bitcoin had been pushed up to 600,000 USD, and the market value was about 70% of gold, which had became the world’s second-largest anti-inflation asset. As energy giants and tech giants continued to increase their strategic reserves of Bitcoin, many developing countries had begun to use Bitcoin as an important national reserve.
In 2025, China’s GDP officially surpassed that of the United States and became the world’s largest economy. The global currency status of the USD was challenged to some extent. China and the United States had formed a close competition and cooperation relationship. The United States hoped to rely on the dominance of the crypto asset trading market to further enhance the influence of the USD. Other countries also begun to use their energy advantages to participate in the crypto computing power market to gain a foothold. As Bitcoin’s market value steadily expanded and volatility decreased, traditional chip giants such as Intel had announced their entry into the crypto-asset computing industry to develop a new generation of miners. While SAI, with its self-developed energy-chip-server-cabinet-computing center and other full-chain infrastructure advantages, had a market value of more than 100 billion USD.
At the same time, the world was fully developing clean energy, photovoltaic industry had became the leading pillar industry of clean power. China had became the leader of the upstream supply chain of the entire PV industry in 2020, with a market share of over 70%. After 5 years of technology iteration, the current cost of PV power generation had reached 0.2 RMB/kWh, much lower than the 0.28 RMB/kWh of thermal power, and very closed to the cost of natural gas power generation. Taking this opportunity, SAI had in-depth cooperation with leading domestic photovoltaic industry companies, jointly launched the “Computing and Energy Photovoltaic Plan”, which aimed to export the computing and energy industry and photovoltaic industry services to the world, and helped backward countries quickly realized self-sufficiency in clean energy and safe and controllable financial reserves. At the same time, solar energy was also one of the most widely available energy sources in the universe, and the full use of photovoltaics had important strategic significance for the future development of SAI.
The successful completion of the second three-year plan marked that SAI had became the world’s largest electricity technology company based on the advantages of computing power technology, and could provide more cost-effective computing power and electricity services to the world, which also meant another big step forward from becoming the world’s largest computing and energy operator.
IV. Third Three-Year Plan — SAIHEAT Heat Ecology (2026–2028)
[2026] Heat for agriculture
Entering 2026, Bitcoin’s market value kept approaching gold, DCEP and USDT started to be widely used, and the world’s mainstream currencies became more and more diversified. However, the common trend was that mainstream currencies had successively opened the settlement mechanism between mainstream currencies and Bitcoin. China also opened the offshore settlement mechanism of RMB to Bitcoin in Hainan, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and Horgos, and established multiple computing power services FTAs in Yunnan, Sichuan, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. The global trade settlement system pattern began to change from SWIFT alone to a diversified development of the USD system SWIFT and the RMB system CIPS, and the BTC system was also constantly optimizing the underlying technology to build up its power to become a decentralized global settlement network in the next step.
This year, the total global population exceeded 8 billion, the food problem was becoming increasingly serious, the good thing was that agricultural technology had made a big breakthrough, high-density constant temperature planting technology was developing rapidly. Because of the need for large amounts of supplemental light and heat, the cost of energy had became the core bottleneck in the development of this technology. Prior to this, SAI ‘s computing power and electricity business had made impressive development achievements, and we were also very concerned about the application of computing power, electricity and heat in agriculture. We began to take advantages of the power and land resources in energy-rich areas such as Xinjiang and Central Asia, and with our computing power and technology modules, we established large-scale unmanned “ computing and energy agriculture bases” in many places, using photovoltaic electricity and waste gas electricity as agricultural supplemental light energy, while providing constant temperature heat source of computing waste heat, which greatly reduced the energy cost of modern agriculture and effectively solved the problem of lagging agricultural development in some areas, helping to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency and clean energy industry chain optimization.
[2027] Heat for industry
With the rapid development of 6G, AI and IoT, all industries were changing and upgrading, especially the industrial and computing industries. SAI had expanded from the earliest crypto-asset computing power business to more computing fields. Based on the advantages of the computing power industry chain, we could quickly deploy computing power for a large number of computing needs in specific industries, and we could also produce customized chips based on customized algorithms and quickly deploy them into edge computing centers. In solving the problem of “heat”, we were constantly expanding the boundaries. On the one hand, we helped industrial heat scenarios to reduce heat costs. On the other hand, with the improvement of chip manufacturing process, the heat flow density of traditional servers, AI servers, and communication base stations was getting higher and higher, which were more similar to mining machines 5 years ago. We used our own heat technology to help more computing industries reduce cooling costs.
[2028] Heat for SAICITY
The global climate, energy, agriculture, and population were undergoing profound and interrelated changes. In order to cope with the harsher environmental conditions that might come. SAI integrated the underlying technological advantages of computing power, electricity, and heat, together witn the industrial resources of computing, industry, and agriculture. It decided to develop in-depth cooperation with Musk’s Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, etc., to establish the first computing and energy new city SAICITY in Central Asia that completely relied on clean and sustainable computing power, electricity, and heat, which was fully self-sufficient. The entire city used photovoltaics as the main energy supply, relying on computing power to improve the efficiency of various industrial chains to realize unmanned automatic management, using crypto assets as the medium of value storage and trading, and used computing waste heat to meet the needs of agriculture, industry, and life.
This year, Bitcoin successfully passed the fifth halving, and 97% of Bitcoins had been fully mined. China and the US, the two superpowers, had adopted the BTC settlement system as a convergence solution to SWIFT and CIPS, which drived further efficiencies in the global trading system. The price of Bitcoin had exceeded $1,000,000 and the market value had surpassed gold to become the world’s largest asset body, and had developed into a global distributed energy technology and financial integration ecology. The computing industry and the energy industry had also achieved multi-dimensional integration to become the computing and energy industry. Human society had started to enter a new technological revolution — the computing and energy era. A era of cross-planet ecosystem based on the breakthrough of computing technology and energy technology was coming.
The successful achievement of the third three-year plan marked that SAI had become the world’s largest heat technology company based on the advantages of computing power and energy technology. We could provide more cost-effective computing power, electricity and heat services to the world, which also meant that we had officially became the world’s largest computing and energy operator.
V. The Fourth Three-Year Plan — SAIMARS Mars Computing and Energy (2029-)
After ten years of development, SAI has accumulated enough experience and resources in earth ecology, and the next decade is dedicated to helping human beings realize cross-planet computing and energy services. SAICITY, which we have successfully established and stably operated on earth, will provide a very good experimental basis for mars habitation, and we are confident that we can provide cross-planet, sustainable, clean and affordable computing power, electricity and heat resources for all human beings.
