Cango's Mining Debut: A $452.8M Masterclass in Losses, 6,594 BTC Mined, and a Swift Pivot to AI

Cango Inc. (NYSE: CANG) reported a net loss of $452.8 million for 2025, a truly impressive feat for its first full year as a bitcoin miner, especially since it managed to rake in $688.1 million in revenue. Mining operations were responsible for $675.5 million of that, meaning the car-trading side hustle contributed a rounding error's worth—just over 98% came from digging for digital gold.

The company dove headfirst into mining in November 2024, acquiring a hefty 32 EH/s of hash rate and deploying it across four continents, from North America to East Africa. Its original business of international auto-trading is still running, chugging along to add a modest $4.8 million in Q4 revenue, roughly the cost of a few high-end mining rigs.

CFO Michael Zhang pointed the finger at "one-off transformation costs" and "market-driven fair-value adjustments" for the colossal loss. He stated Cango is now tightening its treasury policy and raising fresh equity to reduce leverage, a classic move to try and survive volatility and fund new ventures—because when you're down half a billion, what's a little more debt?

Operating costs soared to $1.1 billion for the year, with Q4 expenses alone hitting $456 million. That quarter featured an $81.4 million impairment charge on mining rigs and a $171.4 million hit from the fair-value swing of bitcoin used as collateral, proving that holding your own collateral can sometimes feel like self-sabotage when markets get spicy.

Despite the financial bloodbath, Cango actually mined 6,594.6 BTC in 2025, averaging about 18.07 BTC per day. Production ramped up to 1,718.3 BTC (18.68 BTC/day) in Q4, though costs followed suit like a loyal but expensive shadow. By year-end, total output since its late-2024 launch had reached 7,528.4 BTC.

Shortly after the fiscal year closed, Cango sold approximately $305 million worth of bitcoin, reducing its digital treasure hoard by 60% to pay down debt and fuel a new obsession: AI compute. CEO Paul Yu declared the firm is "advancing our pivot to become an AI infrastructure provider," planning to use its EcoHash platform for flexible AI inference, because why mine bitcoin when you can rent out GPUs to mine for AI hype?

Cango is merely following the herd. Core Scientific also plans to dump "substantially all" of its bitcoin in 2026 to fund AI and high-performance computing, ending 2025 with 2,537 BTC ($222 million) and having already sold about 1,900 BTC for $175 million in January. Even the HODL king, MARA Holdings, with its 53,822 BTC ($4.7 billion) reserve, has loosened its treasury policy for 2026 to allow sales, marking a dramatic shift from its former "diamond hands forever" religion to a more pragmatic "sell high, buy GPUs" strategy.