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Canaan Inc.
Canaan builds the specialized chips and machines that miners use to dig up Bitcoin.
Canaan is a hardware maker for the Bitcoin mining industry. It designs and sells two things that miners need: the ASIC chips—custom silicon built to do one job, which is crunching the math that secures the Bitcoin network—and the finished mining machines, called rigs, that pack those chips into boxes that hum away in warehouses. Miners buy them because the faster and more power-efficient a rig is, the more Bitcoin it can earn per dollar of electricity, and electricity is the biggest cost in mining.
The business is brutally cyclical, because it simply follows the price of Bitcoin. When Bitcoin is flying high, miners rush to expand and pay up for new machines; when the price crashes, orders evaporate and the company can swing to losses. Canaan also sells its chips to other hardware makers, and it has been building out its own mining operations and even a small consumer line of heaters that mine crypto on the side. Its main rivals are other big rig makers like Bitmain (private) and MicroBT-adjacent players, plus publicly traded miners it also competes with for hardware dollars.
Headquartered in Singapore, Canaan was founded in 2013 by Nangeng Zhang and has been listed on Nasdaq since 2019. It is a small, volatile company compared with the chip giants, and its fortunes rise and fall with a single asset's price. Watching Canaan is one of the purest ways to watch the crypto mining hardware cycle in real time.
Saved answer · last researched 14 Nov 2026