Canaan Fleet Hits Record 17.9 J/TH Efficiency in May Update

Canaan Inc. posted a new efficiency record for its North American Bitcoin mining fleet in May. The fleet hit 17.9 joules per terahash (J/TH), an 11% year-over-year improvement. That compares to 18.7 J/TH in both March and April, a roughly 4% gain over two months.

Globally, average fleet efficiency was 23.7 J/TH, up 13.5% from May 2025. The year-over-year trajectory points to newer hardware raising fleet-wide performance at a pace that matters in a compressed hashprice environment.

On the production side, Canaan mined 90 BTC during May and received another 24 BTC from customers. Total crypto treasury reached approximately 1,867 BTC and 3,952 ETH, the highest on record for the firm.

Installed hashrate stood at 10.05 EH/s at month's end. Effective operational hashrate was 6.47 EH/s. The 36% gap stems from the expiration of a hosting agreement, the company said. That leaves roughly 3.6 EH/s of capacity offline or underutilized.

Canaan expanded its pipeline through a partnership with Cipher Mining, taking a 49% stake in West Texas projects. The deal added roughly 4.4 EH/s and 120 MW of capacity. CEO Nangeng Zhang described the May results as evidence of resilience in a difficult market.

For the mining sector, the 17.9 J/TH figure sets a new efficiency benchmark among publicly listed operators in North America. Every 1 J/TH improvement lowers Canaan's power cost per bitcoin, widening the margin over miners running older fleets. The Cipher partnership adds 4.4 EH/s to the pipeline. When that capacity comes online, it could help close the gap between installed and effective hashrate, depending on how the hosting situation evolves.