28 April 2026 – Tether, the largest company in the digital assets industry, is expanding its custom compute infrastructure with a new class of modular, high-density mining systems designed to improve efficiency and performance at scale.
Instead of relying on fully assembled, off-the-shelf mining rigs, Tether is collaborating with Canaan Inc. (NASDAQ: CAN) and ACME Swisstech to build systems around application-specific hash board modules, integrating them into its own control architecture, thermal management systems, and software stack.. The result is a more flexible design that allows operators to maximize performance, manage heat more efficiently, and upgrade individual components without replacing entire machines.
Today’s large-scale mining operations consist of thousands of individual mining units with minimal interaction and awareness of one another. This approach does not allow for performance optimization at a large scale and does not benefit from the design advantages inherent to industrial sites.
Tether’s system addresses this by separating compute from power and enclosure, allowing each component to be optimized independently. When combined with immersion cooling, this approach reduces energy overhead, improves efficiency, and increases system availability.
Traditional mining hardware is built as fixed, monolithic units in which performance, cooling, and upgrade cycles are tightly coupled. Tether’s modular approach breaks that dependency, giving operators the ability to scale incrementally, replace individual components, and optimize systems based on real-time operating conditions rather than factory constraints.
The design is optimized for immersion cooling, although other cooling systems are being developed as well, and provides more direct control over system performance under real operating conditions. Output can be adjusted as needed, and individual components can be replaced or upgraded without replacing the entire mining unit.
“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,” said Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether.
“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,” said Giv Zanganeh, President of ACME Swisstech.
“As a leader at the forefront of market trends, we are seeing growing demand for modular, high-performance hardware that can be integrated directly into customer-designed systems,” said Nangeng Zhang, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Canaan. “Leveraging our strong ASIC design expertise and flexible development platform, we are delivering customized hash board solutions that enable partners to optimize system architecture at the component level. 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. We believe this reflects a broader industry shift toward greater control and customization of compute infrastructure across a wide range of users, from individual users and small businesses to large-scale miners.”
The deployment builds on Tether’s earlier R&D work, including the development of its open-source Mining OS (MOS) and Mining SDK, which were designed to give operators more direct control over hardware, energy usage, and site performance. This next step extends that philosophy into hardware design, moving toward modular systems built around core compute components rather than fixed, preassembled rigs. It is part of Tether’s broader effort to design and control the infrastructure it relies on, in addition to issuing digital assets.
