Mexico's federal Attorney General's Office (FGR), the Navy (SEMAR), and Puebla state police raided a property in the municipality of Tlaola, in the remote Sierra Norte mountains, and seized 300 crypto mining rigs. The equipment was drawing electricity around the meter from a complex fed by the Nuevo Necaxa hydroelectric dam.
Prosecutors are preparing an electricity theft charge, and investigators haven't ruled out money laundering either. According to state utility CFE, non-technical power losses from theft and meter tampering nationwide reached roughly $817 million in just the first seven months of 2024.
What investigators found in Tlaola
Alongside the 300 rigs, officers seized transformers, medium-voltage terminals, and working satellite internet antennas from the site. Tlaola is a municipality of roughly 20,000 people in a hard-to-reach part of the Sierra Norte. Puebla state security minister Francisco Sánchez explained to reporters why locations like this attract illegal miners.
Mining consumes a great deal of energy and generates a lot of noise, he said, which is why operators seek out isolated and very remote locations. That's exactly what drew investigators, who had been tracking reports of illegal mining in the area because of its proximity to the dam.
GPUs instead of ASICs: a sign this wasn't Bitcoin
El País and Mexico News Daily describe the seized machines as GPUs rather than specialized ASIC hardware, which points away from Bitcoin and toward less common altcoins still mined on graphics cards. Before the Ethereum network moved to Proof-of-Stake, GPU farms were the industry's main mining tool, and similar rigs are still used for coins that remain tied to graphics cards.
Mining itself is legal in Mexico. What's illegal is stealing the electricity to run it, and that's the basis for the prosecutors' case.
"There was a very large power connection."
- Francisco Sánchez, Puebla state security minister, press briefing, September 6, 2026
$817 million in power losses over half a year
CFE, the federal utility taking part in the investigation, put non-technical losses from theft, meter tampering, and illegal connections at 6,346 gigawatt-hours between January and July 2024. In money terms, that's about 13.8 billion pesos, or roughly $817 million.
The Tlaola farm isn't the first case near the Nuevo Necaxa dam. A separate farm was found nearby last year, allegedly run out of properties belonging to the electrical workers' union. Three other mining operations were dismantled across Puebla and neighboring Tlaxcala in 2025.
A network of miners in the Sierra Norte mountains
Sánchez described the Tlaola site as part of a wider network exploiting the Sierra Norte's hydroelectric infrastructure. Similar activity is happening in neighboring states, he said, and searches are extending to nearby municipalities.
A mountainous region with cheap hydropower and patchy mobile coverage turned out to be a convenient combination for illegal operators: satellite internet solves the connectivity problem, and proximity to the dam solves the power problem without an official hookup.
Investigators are tracing who funded the hardware
According to local media, forensic accountants are now tracing who paid for the equipment at the farm. The state government is examining whether the mined assets were used to launder proceeds from other crimes. Mined crypto eventually has to be converted into cash or fiat somewhere, and that step is what tends to leave a trail for investigators, even when the mining itself is hard to trace directly.
- Who financed the purchase of the 300 rigs still isn't known, and that's the key question for the forensic accountants.
- The alleged link to the electrical workers' union in last year's nearby case remains an investigative theory, not a proven fact.
- CFE joined the probe as an affected party over the illegal grid connection.
- Mining's legal status in Mexico complicates the case: the charge rests entirely on electricity theft, not on mining itself.
What it means for the mining industry
Mexico is far from the only country fighting electricity theft tied to mining. Malaysian authorities seized more than 75,000 rigs last year, with the utility valuing the losses at $1.1 billion. Police in Rio de Janeiro shut down a similar illegal operation in Brazil.
As long as cheap or stolen power stays the main factor behind mining profitability, mountainous regions near hydroelectric dams will keep attracting these schemes, and utilities will keep having to hunt down illegal connections on their own.
Comments
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *