Invest1 publisher2 min readPublished
Puebla seizes 300 GPUs beside a federal dam in its fourth mining bust of 2025
Mining is legal in Mexico; siphoning power from federal infrastructure is not, and the state utility valued all the electricity stolen nationwide in the first seven months of 2024 at 13.8 billion pesos.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Mexican authorities raided a mining site in Puebla's Sierra Norte mountains between September 6 and 8, seizing about 300 GPUs along with electrical transformers and satellite antennas.
- The farm sat near the Nuevo Necaxa hydroelectric dam, and the main charge is the unauthorized siphoning of power from federal infrastructure, since crypto mining itself remains legal in Mexico.
- The raid is Puebla's fourth bust of an illegal crypto mining operation since early 2025.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- capability Crypto Briefing's argument is that the theft replaces the laundering step: coins that come out of a machine have no history to scrub, so the stolen power supplies what a shell company would otherwise have to.
- constraint Because the offence charged is theft from federal infrastructure, prosecutors have to prove metering and connection evidence, and nothing about the tokens or the buyers needs to enter the case.
- contradiction The account calls four busts systemic while its own national theft figure implies roughly 1.24 GW of continuous draw, a load 300 GPUs cannot explain.
Divide 13.8 billion pesos by 6,346 GWh and the utility is valuing the electricity taken from it at about 2.17 pesos a kilowatt-hour [12]. The figure is CFE's own accounting for January through July 2024, and it covers every form of theft in the country, not only mining [9]. It also sets the ceiling on what a farm running off siphoned lines saves, because it pays none of that.
The same two numbers give the scale. Spread across the 213 days from 1 January to 31 July 2024, 6,346 GWh is close to 30 GWh a day, an average continuous draw of about 1.24 GW [13]. For the 300 GPUs pulled out of the Sierra Norte to account for that load, each would have to draw roughly 4.1 MW [14].
The four Puebla busts since early 2025 measure enforcement attention in one state [5]. If early 2025 means January, that is one raid about every 63 days [15]. Detection was physical: Puebla's security minister, Francisco Sanchez, said the facility's remote location and the noise it generated were the key factors in tipping off investigators [6].
The reason to run this at 300 GPUs has more to do with the output than the power bill. Crypto Briefing reports, without attribution, that crypto-related money laundering by Mexican criminal organizations rose 55.8% in 2025 [10], and argues that coins mined with stolen electricity arrive without a transaction history tied to darknet markets or ransomware payments [11]. Authorities suspect organized crime and are looking into possible connections to the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, though no direct link has been validated [7]. Investigators have also not disclosed which tokens the site was mining [8].
In my view the freshly mined coin is what makes a small farm worth building, since tokens with no history need no further washing, and that holds at a size a merchant miner would ignore. Two other readings fit the same facts. The site may be one node in a larger estate, in which case four busts are a sample. Or it may be a plain theft case with cartel language attached ahead of the evidence [7].
The account does not measure Mexico's legitimate mining capacity or what licensed operators pay CFE for power. The claim that stolen-power hosting now undercuts compliant miners is untested on this record. A fifth raid turning up ASIC hardware at megawatt scale, or a validated cartel link, would begin to test it.
What to watch
- Whether Mexican investigators validate a Sinaloa or CJNG link to the Puebla site, or quietly drop the organized-crime framing.
- Whether CFE publishes 2025 theft losses that can be compared with the 6,346 GWh reported for January to July 2024.
- Whether a fifth Puebla raid turns up ASIC hardware at megawatt scale rather than a few hundred GPUs.