April 28, 2026 – Tether, the digital asset industry leader, is expanding its custom computing 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 working with Canaan Inc. (NASDAQ: CAN) and ACME Swisstech to build a system around application-specific hash board modules and integrate them into its own control architecture, thermal management system, 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 the entire machine.
Today’s large-scale mining operations consist of thousands of individual mining units with minimal interaction and mutual recognition. This approach does not allow for large-scale performance optimization or benefit from design advantages specific to industrial settings.
Tether’s system addresses this issue by separating the compute from the power supply and enclosure, allowing each component to be optimized independently. Combining this approach with immersion cooling reduces energy overhead, increases efficiency, and increases system availability.
Traditional mining hardware is built as a fixed monolithic unit with performance, cooling, and upgrade cycles tightly coupled. Tether’s modular approach breaks that dependency, allowing operators to incrementally expand, replace individual components, and optimize the system based on real-time operating conditions rather than factory constraints.
Although this design is optimized for immersion cooling, other cooling systems have been developed as well, allowing more direct control over system performance under real-world operating conditions. You can adjust the output 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, making them expensive to scale and inefficient to run. Tether is revising that concept by introducing modular computing that can be independently adjusted, upgraded, and cooled. This gives us direct control over cost, efficiency, and how these systems perform at scale.” Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, said:.
“Our close collaboration with Canaan and Tether allows us to design and deliver a mining system that is fundamentally different from today’s plug-and-play, retail-oriented products on the market, and takes a holistic industrial co-design approach aimed at large-scale operations,” he said. Gib Zanganeh, President of ACME Swisstech, said:
“As a leader at the forefront of market trends, we are seeing a growing demand for modular, high-performance hardware that can be integrated directly into customer-designed systems.” Canaan Chairman and CEO Nangeng Zhang. “Leveraging our strong ASIC design expertise and flexible development platform, we offer customized hashboard solutions that allow our partners to optimize system architectures at the component level. Our Avalon hashboard modules offer more flexible options at the component level. “We believe this reflects a broader industry shift towards greater control and customization of computing infrastructure across a wide range of users, from individual users and small businesses to large enterprises.” ”
This deployment builds on Tether’s earlier research and development work, including the development of an open source mining OS (MOS) and mining SDK, which are designed to give operators more direct control over their hardware, energy usage, and site performance. The next step is to extend that philosophy to hardware design, moving to modular systems built around core computing components rather than fixed, pre-assembled rigs. This is part of Tether’s broader efforts to design and control the infrastructure it relies on, in addition to issuing digital assets.
