A new crypto mining company is flexing the Trump name and connections to get ahead.

Early into Trump’s second term as US president, the CEO of energy infrastructure company Hut 8 Asher Genoot and Hut 8 chief strategy officer Michael Ho shared thin crust pizza with Eric Trump at the Trump golf club in Jupiter, Florida. They talked for hours, says Genoot, and tabled a business venture that greatly interested Trump: a bitcoin mining alliance.

They first met through mutual friends in late 2024: Genoot says he’d shown Eric photos of their “beautiful, liquid cool data center” in Amarillo, Texas. Genoot says Eric was intrigued, and told Genoot stories of growing up with his dad on construction sites. The pizza night invite evolved, per Genoot, into almost daily meetings. The result? A company called American Bitcoin (ABTC), which launched on April 1. Hut 8, which reports having “1,020 megawatts of energy capacity under management across 15 sites in the US and Canada,” owns 80 percent of the company, while Trump, his brother Donald Jr., and legacy shareholders of their former data center business, American Data Centers, own the other 20 percent. Eric is a cofounder and chief strategy officer of American Bitcoin.

ABTC’s CEO Matt Prusak (who is also the former CEO of Hut 8-affiliated bitcoin mining company Ionic Digital) says the Trump brothers brought “two things to the table.” One was access to capital markets, through the Trumps’ international business connections, while the second and arguably more compelling value add was, per Prusak, “narrative”—the one that comes with the Trump family name.

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