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Tether has partnered with Nasdaq-listed Canaan Inc. and Swiss engineering firm ACME Swisstech to build a modular class of Bitcoin mining hardware built around ASIC hash board modules, with the first production order targeting an immersion-cooled facility in South America.
Big news. ⚡
We're extending our collaboration with @Tether_to, custom hash board modules, built for next-gen immersion-cooled mining and compute systems.
Modular. High-density. Designed to scale.
This is the way the industry is moving. https://t.co/UWbuYhaTwq— Canaan Inc. (@canaanio) April 28, 2026
Tether announced on April 28, 2026 a new hardware partnership with Canaan Inc., the Singapore-based ASIC designer and manufacturer whose shares trade on the Nasdaq, and ACME Swisstech, a Swiss project management and industrial engineering firm. The deal follows a 2025 research and development effort between the same three parties that produced a proof-of-concept platform.
The production order announced Tuesday takes that proof-of-concept into deployment, with Canaan supplying high-density hash board modules for an immersion-cooled facility linked to Tether in South America. The agreement includes an option for additional purchases, giving Tether the ability to scale the hardware footprint if performance meets targets.
The design breaks from the conventional mining rig model in a specific way. Standard Bitcoin mining hardware ships as a fully assembled, sealed unit in which compute, power supply, and enclosure are fixed together. Upgrading one element means replacing the entire machine. Tether’s approach pulls those three layers apart.
Canaan supplies ASIC hash board modules as discrete components. ACME Swisstech handles industrial integration. Tether assembles the full system within its own control architecture and thermal management stack.
Each component can be tuned, upgraded, or replaced independently. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino put it directly: “Most mining infrastructure is still built as sealed, fixed units, which makes it expensive to scale and inefficient to run. Tether is revisioning that concept by deploying modular compute that can be tuned, upgraded, and cooled independently, so we can directly control cost, efficiency, and how these systems perform at scale.”
The Canaan deal is the hardware layer of an infrastructure strategy Tether has been building systematically across 2025 and 2026. Earlier this year, the company open-sourced Mining OS, a production-grade operating system for managing individual rigs that uses a peer-to-peer Holepunch architecture and routes no data through centralized cloud services.
On April 27, one day before the Canaan announcement, Tether released its Mining Development Kit (MDK), an open-source JavaScript and React-based orchestration layer that sits above Mining OS and handles fleet-level management, automated workflows, and analytics across entire facilities.
The modular hardware announced Tuesday now completes the stack: Tether controls the operating system on the machine, the software coordinating the fleet, and the physical components inside the rig itself. Canaan CEO Nangeng Zhang confirmed the strategic logic from the hardware side, saying the company is seeing growing demand for hash board modules that operators can integrate into their own systems rather than deploying off-the-shelf rigs.
Last week, Tether separately disclosed an 8.2% stake in Antalpha, a Bitmain-linked mining finance firm, adding a financial infrastructure position to its operational hardware and software moves. Canaan holds 1,808 Bitcoin on its own balance sheet, valued at roughly $137 million and the highest level the company has recorded to date.
The modular systems have no published release timeline beyond the South America deployment, and Tether has not released imagery of the production design. Ardoino has stated publicly that Tether’s goal is to become the world’s largest Bitcoin miner, a target that the combination of proprietary hardware, open-source software, and mining finance exposure is now clearly designed to support.
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