Tether has announced a new partnership with Canaan Inc. (NASDAQ: CAN) and ACME Swisstech to develop a modular class of bitcoin mining infrastructure, moving away from the fixed, preassembled rigs that dominate the industry today.
Breaking from traditional hardware
Rather than deploying off-the-shelf mining rigs, the three companies are building systems around application-specific hash board modules, integrating them into Tether’s own control architecture, thermal management systems, and software stack.
The core idea is to separate compute from power and enclosure, so each component can be optimized independently.
The design is built primarily for immersion cooling, which reduces energy overhead and improves system availability, though other cooling approaches are also being developed.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino explained the motivation:
“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.”
What each partner brings
Giv Zanganeh, President of ACME Swisstech, described the collaboration’s ambition:
“The close collaboration with Canaan and Tether allows us to design and deliver mining systems that are radically different from today’s plug-and-play, retail-oriented products in the market and take a holistic, industrial co-design approach aimed at large-scale operations.”
Canaan Chairman and CEO Nangeng Zhang pointed to broader industry demand driving the shift:
“We are seeing growing demand for modular, high-performance hardware that can be integrated directly into customer-designed systems. Our Avalon hash board module enables more flexible, on-demand deployment at the component level while improving efficiency and reducing operational complexity, particularly in immersion-cooled systems.”
Building on existing open-source work
The partnership extends Tether’s earlier infrastructure work, including the open-source Mining OS (MOS) and Mining SDK it released to give operators more direct control over hardware, energy usage, and site performance.
This new modular hardware initiative is part of Tether’s broader strategy to design and control the infrastructure it relies on, alongside its core business of issuing digital assets like USDT.
