Canaan to Heat 2,800 Nordic Homes With Bitcoin Miners

Canaan (NASDAQ: CAN) Inc. has been selected to support an 8-megawatt district heating project in the Nordic region, marking its latest effort to position Bitcoin mining hardware as heat infrastructure rather than only compute equipment.

The Singapore-based maker of Avalon mining machines said the project will use its A1566HA hydro-cooled units to feed hot water into a local district heating network operated by an unnamed Nordic heating provider. About 2 MW of the system, consisting of 228 units, is already operating in the region and providing hot water to local residents, according to the company.

The customer placed a follow-on order in March for another 6 MW, or 692 additional units, after evaluating competing solutions, Canaan said. The full 8 MW project is expected to provide heating for about 2,800 homes.

The project underscores a growing push by Bitcoin mining hardware makers and operators to reuse the heat generated by ASIC machines, especially in colder climates where district heating systems already distribute hot water through centralized networks.

Canaan said its hydro-cooled miners can produce hot water at around 80 degrees Celsius, a temperature high enough for direct integration into existing district heating systems. That has been one of the main technical hurdles for heat-reuse projects, as many data center heat recovery systems require additional heat pumps or other infrastructure before the output can be used at scale.

The company said the parallel design of the heating nodes — made up of hundreds of individual miners that can be overclocked or underclocked — gives the system more flexibility than a single-source heat system such as a boiler. The distributed setup also makes maintenance easier because individual units can be serviced without taking the entire thermal source offline, Canaan said.

“Heat reuse is no longer an ancillary byproduct of compute,” Canaan Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Nangeng Zhang said in the statement. “It is central to building a more efficient, sustainable energy future, and a core part of how we think about system design at Canaan.”

The Nordic deployment builds on Canaan’s broader effort to market mining hardware around energy reuse. In January, the company announced a 3 MW proof-of-concept project in Manitoba, Canada, with Bitforest Investment Ltd. to use heat from 360 liquid-cooled Avalon A1566HA units as supplemental heat for greenhouse operations. That system was designed to preheat water for electric boilers through a closed-loop heat exchanger, with Canaan estimating that about 90% of the electricity consumed by the servers could be captured and transferred to the heating system.

Canaan has also pushed heat reuse at the consumer level. At CES 2025, it introduced the Avalon Mini 3, a home Bitcoin miner designed to double as a space heater, part of a broader attempt to make mining devices more practical for residential users.

Europe has become one of the most active testing grounds for the hash-to-heat model because of its cold climate, high heating demand and existing district heating infrastructure. Bitcoin mining infrastructure firm Hashlabs has previously worked on mining-based heating in Finland, while MARA (NASDAQ: MARA) Holdings has publicized a 2 MW pilot in Finland that recycles heat from digital asset compute into a local district heating facility.