The windswept town of Cheyenne, Wyoming, known for its cowboy culture, doesn’t seem like the kind of place anyone would need to worry about geopolitical espionage.
Yet, the Biden administration was concerned enough in May to make a rare move and issue an executive order shutting down MineOne Partners Ltd. and its affiliates. The firms are majority-owned by Chinese nationals.
The 12-acre site, purchased in 2022, is a mile away from Warren Air Force Base, home to the U.S. Minuteman III nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.
If not for a public tip, the federal government would not have known about the crypto mine site, which uses computers to mine Bitcoins.
Land purchased or owned by people and entities with ties to China and located near military facilities or infrastructure is being scrutinized more closely as tensions between Washington and Beijing rise.
Chinese investors made 97 land transactions between 2020 and 2022, the most of all foreign nationals. The data did not specifically list real estate deals, according to a 2022 report from the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS). CFIUS is responsible for tracking and investigating foreign nationals’ real estate and business purchases.
States with the largest Chinese holdings are Texas, 159,640 acres; North Carolina, 44,776 acres; Missouri, 43,071 acres; Utah, 32,447 acres; and Virginia, 14,382 acres, according to the USDA in its most recent report.
Most of the land is held by a handful of Chinese investors.
However, so far, federal legislation to limit Chinese nationals or entities from purchasing land has gone nowhere.
And presidential prohibitions of foreign acquisitions like the one President Joe Biden issued against MineOne are rare.
Only eight such orders have been made since the administration of President Gerald Ford in 1975, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.