Canaan Now Earns More Mining Bitcoin Than Selling Rigs, With 1,875 BTC in Reserve

Canaan, a longtime maker of bitcoin mining machines, now earns more from mining bitcoin itself than from selling the rigs that made its name. Its third-quarter numbers show a company leaning on its own hashrate, a treasury of 1,875 BTC and a plan to secure 2 gigawatts of Texas power.

The Nasdaq-listed company, which trades under the ticker CAN, published its unaudited results on November 10 in an exhibit to a Form 6-K filed with the SEC. The release covers the three months ended September 30, 2026.

Mining revenue overtakes machine sales

Total revenue came in at $14.5 million, near the upper end of the company’s guidance. That compares with $31.9 million in the second quarter and $150.5 million a year earlier.

The mix is the real story. Mining machine sales brought in just $4.8 million, down from $118.6 million in the third quarter of 2025, as Canaan sold 1.0 million TH/s of computing power into what it called weak demand and intense price competition. Its own mining operations produced 133 BTC and generated $9.5 million.

So for the first time in this comparison, the bitcoin Canaan mines for itself is the bigger business. Mining ran at a gross margin of roughly 30% before depreciation, helped by an all-in power cost of about $0.043 per kilowatt-hour across approximately 10 EH/s of installed, non-joint-venture capacity.

The company also holds a 49% interest in a mining venture called Project ABC, which has 4.87 EH/s installed and paid Canaan more than $1.2 million in cash distributions.

A bitcoin rebound flipped the quarter to a profit

Canaan swung to GAAP net income of $8.0 million, from a net loss of $97.6 million in the second quarter. Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure, was $22.4 million.

Bitcoin did most of that work. The higher price on September 30 compared with June 30 produced a $20.1 million gain on the fair value of its cryptocurrency and a $31.9 million gain on financial derivatives, or $51.9 million combined. Chief Financial Officer Jin “James” Cheng said plainly that “this non-cash gain is distinct from underlying operating performance.”

That candor matters. The operating business still lost $42.9 million, although that was a sharp improvement on the $69.5 million operating loss in the second quarter. Inventory-related write-downs shrank to about $8.2 million from $25.3 million, a sign the company has largely worked through excess stock.

Even so, the result shows how directly a miner’s balance sheet moves with the asset it produces. When bitcoin recovers, a company holding it outright feels the benefit immediately.

Inside the 1,875 BTC treasury

As of September 30, Canaan held a total of 1,875.5 bitcoin. The filing breaks that figure into three parts, and only a minority sits unencumbered.

About 517.5 BTC is held directly as cryptocurrency assets, carried at a fair value of $43.7 million. Another 1,258 BTC is pledged as collateral for secured term loans, and 100 BTC sits in a fixed-term product. Together the pledged and fixed-term coins are booked as a cryptocurrency receivable worth $114.2 million.

Pledging coins rather than selling them lets a miner raise cash while keeping its exposure to bitcoin. Chief Executive Nangeng Zhang said Canaan has kept its long-term holding strategy, though he also said it is “selectively monetizing cryptocurrency holdings to fund share repurchases.” Readers watching the treasury should expect the number to move with that policy rather than climb in a straight line.

Two gigawatts of Texas power in the pipeline

The longer-term bet is energy. Canaan’s 1 GW large-load project in Duval County, Texas, received a conditional “Studied Load – Firm” classification under the Texas grid operator’s Batch Zero process. The company called it a meaningful grid connection milestone, while noting it remains subject to further studies and approvals.

A second 1 GW project in Zapata County is in early-stage development. In October, Canaan also completed a roughly $1.1 million purchase of land in the United States to support its power plans.

Those projects require capital. During the third quarter Canaan posted $50 million of restricted cash as collateral for a letter of credit tied to long-term infrastructure arrangements, and made project prepayments of about $3.3 million. Cash and restricted cash totaled $72.8 million at quarter-end, compared with $80.8 million at the end of 2025.

Large, flexible power loads are in demand. Bitcoin miners and AI developers are increasingly competing for the same grid capacity, a tension that showed up in Anthropic’s IPO filing, which named crypto miners as rivals for power. Canaan says it wants to use its sites for both mining and other compute.

A $20 million buyback and what comes next

On November 6, Canaan’s board approved a share repurchase authorization of up to $100 million over 12 months. The company is starting with an initial program of up to $20 million.

Management said it believes the current market valuation does not fully reflect Canaan’s long-term potential, and that it plans to buy back shares more actively as funds become available. It had 690,594,191 American depositary shares outstanding at the end of September.

For anyone following Canaan stock, the third quarter draws a clear line between the old business and the new one. Rig sales have collapsed, but the company is still producing bitcoin at a positive cash margin, holding a sizable treasury and lining up power capacity that could outlast the current downturn in hardware demand.

The open questions are execution and funding. The Duval County approval is conditional, Zapata County is early, and the buyback will compete with power projects for cash. What the filing does show is a hardware maker whose fortunes are now tied more closely than ever to the health of the bitcoin network and the price of the coin it mines.