Canaan shares jump 40% as miners turn flared gas into power amid bitcoin-to-AI infrastructure boom

Nasdaq-listed Canaan Inc. (ticker CAN) shares climbed 40% Monday after the company, which primarily manufactures bitcoin mining hardware, unveiled a pilot project in Calgary, Alberta that converts flared natural gas into electricity for high-density computing, including bitcoin mining and AI workloads.

Developed with Calgary-based Aurora AZ Energy, the deployment will use roughly $2 million worth of Avalon A15 Pro miners to generate about 2.5 megawatts of compute power directly at natural-gas wellheads. Canaan said the modular setup is expected to cut 12,000 to 14,000 metric tons of CO₂-equivalent emissions annually by reducing flaring.

Canaan CEO Nangeng Zhang said the pilot demonstrates how “previously wasted resources can become productive energy for the next generation of distributed AI infrastructure.”

Canaan shares were trading at $1.53 at the time of publication, among their highest levels this year. However, earlier in October, the stock briefly touched $1.56 after the company announced a 50,000-unit order for its Avalon A15 Pro miners, its largest single sale in three years.

Its gas-to-compute project in Canada aligns with a trend of bitcoin infrastructure being retooled for the AI era.

In a Monday tweet , VanEck’s Matthew Sigel cited a Morgan Stanley analysis arguing that "Bitcoin sites offer AI players the fastest time to power with the lowest execution risk, and believe this will increasingly be valued and recognized."

Galaxy Digital has also moved in that direction, raising a further $460 million earlier this month in a push to convert its former Helios bitcoin mine in Texas into a large-scale data center for AI-cloud provider CoreWeave, also leveraging existing energy-dense sites for broader compute demand.