Canaan revenue falls 90% to $14.5 million as rig sales dry up

Bitcoin mining rig maker Canaan reported third-quarter revenue of $14.5 million on Tuesday, down about 90 percent from a year earlier as demand for its machines dried up. The company still booked an $8 million profit, almost all of it on paper.

Canaan released the numbers before US markets opened and filed them with the Securities and Exchange Commission. A year earlier, the same quarter brought in $150.5 million. Equipment sales alone fell to $4.8 million, a drop of 96 percent.

A profit that did not come from the business

Canaan's operations lost money. Loss from operations widened to $42.9 million, from $23.9 million a year earlier. The reported profit came from somewhere else.

It booked a $20.1 million gain on the bitcoin it holds, because the coin's price rose through the quarter. It recorded another $31.9 million gain on financial derivatives. Strip those two paper gains out and the quarter looks far worse than the headline number.

Chief Financial Officer Jin 'James' Cheng said the results 'reflected financial discipline and operational agility in a challenging market.' Chairman and Chief Executive Nangeng Zhang said revenue came in 'near the upper end of our guidance range.' The bar was low. Canaan had guided for $11 million to $15 million.

Demand for mining machines dried up

Canaan builds the specialized computers that mine bitcoin. In the third quarter, almost nobody was buying. Equipment sales of $4.8 million compare with $118.6 million a year earlier. The company blamed weaker demand and lower prices for its rigs.

That fits a wider squeeze. Bitcoin's April 2024 halving cut the reward miners earn per block in half, and the economics have been tight since. When each machine earns less, operators stop ordering new ones. Canaan's own mining arm produced 133 bitcoin in the quarter, worth about $9.5 million, down from 267 coins a year earlier. It held roughly 1,875 bitcoin at the end of September, most of it pledged against loans.

Canaan is a smaller maker of these machines, well behind the market leader Bitmain. A downturn in orders tends to hit the smaller firms first. To cushion the blow, Canaan has leaned harder on mining coins itself and on holding bitcoin, which is why the price of the coin now moves its reported results more than its sales do.

A whole sector leaning on side bets

Canaan's numbers are not an outlier. Across the sector, miners are hunting for income that does not rise and fall with one coin.

Some are chasing artificial intelligence. IREN wound down its bitcoin mining this month as its AI business passed $200 million in revenue. Others lean on their coin piles to dress up the books, the same move Canaan just made. American Bitcoin posted a $126 million profit last week that came mostly from the rising value of its holdings, not from mining.

The shift carries its own risk. A balance sheet full of bitcoin turns a mining-equipment company into something closer to a bet on the coin's price. When the price climbs, the gains flatter the accounts. When it slides, they bite. That is the trade Canaan and several peers have made, and the fourth quarter will test it.

What to watch

Those paper gains could reverse. The $20.1 million bitcoin gain reflected the coin's price at the end of September. Since then it has fallen hard. Bitcoin traded near $72,916 at 17:45 UTC on 10 November 2026, according to CoinGecko, well below its late-September level. If the price stays down, the accounting that lifted the third quarter will drag on the fourth.

Watch the buyback too. On 6 November the board approved spending up to $20 million on repurchasing shares, part of a $100 million plan that runs for a year. Buying back stock while operations burn cash is a bet that the shares cost less than the business is worth. Investors will judge whether it holds.

Canaan's Texas build-out is the other thing to track. The company bought a 49 percent stake in three West Texas mining projects for about $40 million this year, a push to earn from running machines rather than only selling them. One site in Duval County cleared an early grid-study step with the Texas operator ERCOT. Neither Canaan nor ERCOT has said when it will switch on.