Canaan Inc. CAN

The business

Canaan does two things, both keyed to one variable. It designs and sells Avalon Bitcoin-mining ASIC machines (the historical core, split into industrial rigs and a smaller home-mining line), and it runs its own Bitcoin self-mining fleet, holding the coins it mines as a treasury. In the most recent quarter (Q1 2026) the heavy-lifting slice was still hardware: mining-machine sales were about $42.3M of $62.7M total revenue (roughly 67%, split $39.6M industrial and $2.7M home), with self-mining the other $19.1M (about 30%). So the franchise today is still an ASIC vendor with a growing captive miner bolted on, not yet a miner with a hardware side business. There is a stated ambition in edge-AI chips, but it is a rounding error in revenue and should be treated as optionality, not a segment.

What the financials do not show is how completely this equity rides the Bitcoin price and the post-2024-halving hashprice cycle. When Bitcoin is high, miners buy rigs and Canaan's own hashrate earns more per unit; when it falls, machine demand evaporates and the self-mining margin compresses, both at once. Revenue is violently lumpy on this cycle: Q1 2026 revenue of $62.7M was down from $196.3M the prior quarter, and Q2 2026 is guided to just $35M to $45M. Layered on top are US-China and tariff risk on ASIC exports into the US market, customer-concentration and inventory risk (Q1 2026 carried a $25M inventory write-down), and a hard competitive truth: Canaan is a distant number two or three in ASICs behind Bitmain, which dominates the market, with MicroBT the other major private Chinese maker. Installed self-mining hashrate did grow to 11.0 EH/s, up 66% year over year, and the company sold a record 36.5 EH/s of computing power across 2025, so it is not shrinking. It is competing hard for third place in a commodity race it does not lead.