The Tokyo based tech company GMO released the following statement concerning their progress towards developing high performance mining processors:

[GMO] is currently developing cutting-edge 7 nm process technologies for chips to be used in the mining process. We are currently jointly working on research and development with our alliance partner who possesses semiconductor design technology to realize next-generation mining board, a high-performance computer for mining.

The company expressed two significant accomplishments:

• They have created a valid SHA256 logic circuit for the 7nm microchip.
• A 12 nm semiconductor mining chip has been developed.

GMO has hinted at plans to establish Bitcoin mines in some northern European country (or countries), where it is cold and there is an abundance of renewable energy. The light cycles of the far north make generating solar power during winter insufficient for mining and natural gas is considered non-renewable. One could infer that GMO has targeted Iceland as the nation for its industrial computing centers because of the abundance of accessible thermal energy. Due to the high value of the next-generation computing equipment at such a place(s), the location of the mine(s) may never be publicly revealed.

The 12 nm semiconductor precedes the 7 nm int terms generations. For those new to the terminology used to describe this hardware, “nm” stands for nanometer, which is one billionth of a meter. Producing increasingly smaller mining chips has many positive impacts on industrial computing as a whole: - Smaller chips means more processing power per unit of raw, general computer material. - Smaller chips tend to require less resources to create (ie. less conductive metals), use less electricity, and produce less heat.

In evaluating the generational decrement from 12 nm to 7 nm, we may establish GMO’s semiconductor family of having a growth rate of:

\( size = ( \frac {previous size} {2} ) + 1 \)

If this holds true following generations of GMO’s semiconductors, it may be the case that Moore’s law is taking on a logarithmic curve (further data would be needed to prove such an extrapolation).