In 2025, Cango generated $688 million in revenue, 98% of it from Bitcoin crypto mining, up 665.3% from 2024.

Those are the numbers Cango (NYSE: CANG) reported in its full-year 2025 financial results.

A year earlier, the company was still in China’s auto finance business. With powerful backing, it sold off all of its China operations within a year and turned itself into a global mining company registered in Dallas, Texas, with 50 EH/s of computing power.

But the same financial report showed another number: a full-year net loss of $622 million.

How did a company whose revenue rose nearly sevenfold end up posting a record loss?

From Selling Cars to Crypto Mining in Less Than a Year

Cango’s pivot has been unusually fast, even by the standards of the crypto mining industry.

Founded in 2010 as an auto finance matching platform, Cango at its peak held 47.5 billion yuan in outstanding loans and became China’s first listed auto finance stock. But as competition in China’s auto market intensified in recent years, its legacy business shrank sharply and its market value once fell to rock bottom.

Faced with that squeeze, Cango did not wait it out. It moved aggressively. In May 2024, it sold its 14-year-old domestic auto business for $352 million. Just six months later, in November 2024, Cango used the cash proceeds and newly issued shares to buy roughly 50,000 mining rigs from Bitmain for $256 million, instantly securing 32 EH/s of computing power;

It then issued another 147 million shares to sellers including Golden TechGen in exchange for 18 EH/s.

That series of deals pushed its computing power to 50 EH/s, putting Cango overnight among the mid-tier global Bitcoin mining companies.

By the end of 2025, the company had completed a full genetic mutation: its workforce had been cut from several thousand people to about 100, its listing structure and settlement currency had changed, and it mined nearly 6,600 Bitcoins for the year. In substance, it had shifted from a Chinese ADR into an overseas mining company.

After the pivot, Cango delivered explosive 2025 revenue of $688 million.

But behind that $688 million in revenue was a $622 million loss.

After mining so much Bitcoin in a year, how did it still lose so much money?

Most of the $622 Million Loss Was Not Cash Spent

The $622 million loss sounds alarming, but a closer look at the financial report shows that most of it was accounting treatment and a breakup cost.

Of that amount, $338 million came from mining rig impairment, and nearly $100 million came from a decline in the value of Bitcoin collateral. Together, those two items exceeded $400 million. They were paper losses required under accounting rules, not actual cash flowing out of the company’s bank account.

Another $169 million was the cost of fully cutting off the old domestic auto business.

Stripping out those paper write-downs and divestiture costs, management’s underlying scorecard was that the core business, measured by adjusted EBITDA, actually earned $24.52 million for the year.

That suggests Cango is indeed making money as long as the machines are running.

The problem is that keeping those machines running is not cheap.

Data show that Cango’s all-in cost to mine one Bitcoin for the full year approached $97,000. In the fourth quarter, that figure even jumped to $106,000.

When Bitcoin prices were surging, high costs were masked. But once the price falls below the $100,000 threshold, margins get squeezed quickly.

Cango CEO Yu Peng’s answer is “efficiency over scale”: phase out older mining rigs, shift computing power to regions such as the Middle East and Africa where electricity is cheaper, and try to bring costs down.

But supporting that transformation has left Cango with a heavy burden. Its long-term debt surged from zero to $557 million, and in February 2026 it sold more than 4,400 Bitcoins to repay part of that debt.

High costs, heavy debt, and a fate tied almost entirely to Bitcoin’s price swings.

Cango’s management knows better than anyone that crypto mining alone is not a durable story. The company needs another path.

EcoHash: Cango’s AI Second Curve for a Mining Company

Cango believes that path is AI.

In 2025, Cango set up a wholly owned subsidiary, EcoHash Technology, also headquartered in Dallas, to provide AI inference services.

This is the same direction much of the mining industry is now talking about.

After all, if the cheap electricity, vacant space, and cooling equipment already sitting inside mining farms can be used to mine Bitcoin, why can’t they be used to run AI computing?

Cango’s approach is different. It has chosen a relatively asset-light, opportunistic strategy: avoid the large data centers where tech giants are fighting it out, and focus instead on affordable computing power for small and midsize businesses. In practice, that means placing containerized server modules directly inside existing mining farms, deploying them quickly like building blocks, and focusing on practical AI applications such as copywriting and image recognition.

The upside is lower investment, faster deployment, and flexibility: if the AI business does not work, the company can switch back to crypto mining at any time. The risk is whether this simplified version of a machine room can truly meet customer requirements, something the market still needs to test.

According to the latest financial report, revenue from this AI business is still zero. Everything remains in the first phase of “testing and infrastructure.”

Still, Cango has to tell this story.

In capital markets, the valuation ceiling for a pure crypto mining company is too low. Yu Peng said on the earnings call that once Cango successfully attaches the label of “AI infrastructure,” investors will stop looking at it through the lens of “how many coins it holds” and start asking “how much money each megawatt of power can earn,” which would reshape its valuation entirely.

But the question is hard to avoid: how can a company that just shed its old business and carries more than $500 million in debt manage such a large mining rig fleet, while also connecting seamlessly to the most sought-after AI hardware?

Could there be someone behind it?

Who Stands Behind Cango?

Behind Cango stands the global mining rig giant Bitmain.

In public filings, Cango has repeatedly stated that it has no direct equity relationship with mining rig giant Bitmain.

But the actual control chain tells a very different story. Start with control rights.

An entity called EWCL holds only 4.71% of the shares, but through super-voting shares that give each vote the weight of 20, it controls nearly half, or 49.71%, of the company’s voting power.

The key figures behind that entity are executives from Bitmain’s inner circle.

Then look at personnel and business ties. The resumes of Cango’s chairman, CEO, and other core team members are almost all marked by links to Bitmain-affiliated companies.

Cango paid for Bitmain mining rigs, placed those machines in Bitmain’s U.S. mining farms, and even outsourced daily operations and maintenance to Bitmain. Objectively, it was because Cango tied itself to Bitmain that it could complete such an aggressive transformation in less than a year and obtain top-tier resources that others coveted.

But that deep entanglement has drawn the attention of U.S. regulators and calls for review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS.

In September 2025, U.S. Representative Zachary Nunn sent a letter to the Treasury Department asking CFIUS to review the “complex ownership structure and financing arrangements” between Bitmain and Cango, arguing that they could pose national security risks.

So far, CFIUS has not publicly taken action, but in the eyes of many observers, the relationship between Bitmain and Cango is far from clean.

Even Cango’s pivot appears to carry Bitmain’s imprint.

Other mining companies are moving into AI as a proactive hedge. Cango, by contrast, seems more like a passive buyer of what was handed to it. After taking in 187,000 kilograms of Bitmain mining rig inventory in 2024, if crypto mining could not make money, the only way to recover value was to convert it into AI computing power. The AI modules Cango is now building use Bitmain’s “pluggable GPU mining rigs.”

Bitmain controls nearly half of Cango’s voting power and plays the roles of shareholder, landlord, and sole supplier all at once. It is said to have converted mining rigs into AI modules and passed them to Cango as a way to clear inventory and test an AI route.

No wonder some people call Cango a “shadow company.”

It gives Bitmain, which cannot list in the U.S., a financing channel in the American stock market. Bitmain, in turn, solves Cango’s equipment supply and technical path for transformation.

Cango has both the decisiveness to cut off its old business and the ambition to embrace a new market trend.

But whether Cango is an independently run listed company or a financing channel for Bitmain’s ecosystem in the U.S. stock market may matter more than either Bitcoin’s price or its computing power.