--- title: "From auto finance to Bitcoin to AI—Kango's \"What Shouldn't Be Done\"" type: "News" locale: "en" url: "https://longbridge.com/en/news/292372956.md" description: "Kango (NYSE: CANG) is transforming from a Bitcoin miner to an AI computing provider by leveraging its energy infrastructure. Unlike peers leasing power to hyperscalers, Kango launched EcoHash to utilize scattered mining capacity for AI inference. The company's strategy prioritizes energy ownership over cryptocurrency, having acquired Bitmain rigs and sold its auto business to pivot toward high-performance computing." datetime: "2026-07-11T08:09:44.000Z" locales: - [zh-CN](https://longbridge.com/zh-CN/news/292372956.md) - [en](https://longbridge.com/en/news/292372956.md) - [zh-HK](https://longbridge.com/zh-HK/news/292372956.md) generator: "portal-rs" --- # From auto finance to Bitcoin to AI—Kango's "What Shouldn't Be Done" Author: Forbes; Translator: AididiaoJP, Foresight News “From the outside, people must have thought this company was crazy,” Juliet said. “Who are they? They’re making such a bold move and they know absolutely nothing about the industry.” She was referring to the day a Chinese auto loan company invested hundreds of millions of dollars to become a Bitcoin miner. That was about a year and a half ago. Now, it’s doing the opposite. Almost every publicly traded Bitcoin mining company is scrambling to lease electricity to hyperscale cloud service providers that are building massive AI training clusters. Kango (NYSE: CANG) is doing the opposite. Kango is currently in the third phase of its transformation. It went public in New York in 2018, at the time the only Chinese auto financing platform listed in the US. In November 2024, it agreed to acquire approximately 50 ithashes of Bitmain’s mining rigs, becoming a pure Bitcoin mining company. Then, on April 13th of this year, it launched an AI inference subsidiary called EcoHash, equipped with its own software layer, EcoLink. There was no AI training, nor any newly built giant data centers. It was simply betting that the scattered small mining companies that hyperscale cloud service providers couldn't utilize were where a large amount of AI computing power would reside. Note: 50 EH/s is an extremely large computing power. Currently, the total hash rate of the global Bitcoin network typically fluctuates around 600–800 EH/s. 50 EH/s represents approximately 6–8% of the global total computing power, a level comparable to a single acquisition by a large mining company, and can bring significant mining capacity. "What not to do is just as important as what to do," said Juliet, Senior Director of Communications at Kango. She repeatedly emphasized this statement. These nine words are the core of the entire strategy. Energy First, Bitcoin Second. Ms. Ye stated that the company never intended to mine Bitcoin from the beginning; it wanted to own energy. She is intimately familiar with this history. She worked at Kango for eight years, previously at The Wall Street Journal and the consulting firm FTI. Her story begins with automobiles. Kango invested early in the Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer Li Auto, before its IPO. When Li Auto went public in 2020, Kango recorded a fair value gain of approximately 3.3 billion yuan (about $508 million) and became interested in the power business behind the cars. By 2023, it began looking for energy projects in Australia and the Middle East. "During a trip to the Middle East to look for solar projects, management stumbled upon Bitmain," Ms. Ye said. This is how the auto loan company met Bitcoin mining. What truly impressed them wasn't the cryptocurrency, but the infrastructure. "All these mining sites are basically energy infrastructure," Ms. Ye said. "The only reason mining farms exist is that they consume energy and convert that energy into cryptocurrency. We can still convert energy into other things." Mining was just an entry point. "We never thought about doing Bitcoin mining from day one. We thought about operating the energy infrastructure from day one." The entry cost was substantial. In November 2024, Kango acquired Bitmain's 32 ithash mining rigs for $256 million in cash, followed by a stock acquisition of another 18 ithashes, which were given to a company run by a former Bitmain CFO. To shed its "China concept stock" label, it sold its entire domestic automotive business for approximately $352 million. It brought in crypto-native leadership, including a new CEO and a chairman who founded Antalpha, a financing company associated with Bitmain World. By mid-2025, the lending business was gone. A mining company took its place. Why is everyone shifting? Kango isn't the only mining company transforming for artificial intelligence. The mathematics of mining meets the mathematics of artificial intelligence, both vying for the same thing: electricity. "The future of AI and high-performance computing may be the past of Bitcoin mining," said Leo Wang, an executive at Canaan Creative, on the On The Margin podcast. In 2021, miners were the villains, accused of consuming electricity. Now, that same electricity is in high demand. "It's all an energy game," Wang said. "We believe that energy will become a scarcer asset for everyone in the future." What miners hold, and what AI labs crave, isn't chips, but a plug. Building new substations and securing long-term grid contracts could take years. “When hyperscale cloud providers look for suppliers that can provide short-term guaranteed power, they turn to Bitcoin miners because Bitcoin miners have already invested and secured power,” Wang said. He added that miners are “lucky” that AI emerged around the time of the block reward halving. The timing and cycle are in sync. “We’ve been following the four-year cycle very accurately,” crypto investor Michael Terpin said on the On The Margin podcast. After each halving, mining margins tighten, and operators look for a second way to make money. The market has followed suit. Core Scientific was an early mover, leasing capacity to AI cloud provider CoreWeave, and other miners, from IREN to a company once known as Bitfarms, have followed suit. “Crypto mining repositories are quietly shifting to AI inference and generating about four times the revenue,” the analyst behind the @0xCristal account wrote on the X platform. “A graphics processing unit (GPU) repository serving large language model inference earns more than mining blocks.” This is precisely what sets Kango apart. The common practice is to convert a few large sites into AI training parks and sign long-term leases with a hyperscale cloud provider. Kango rejected this approach. “We absolutely will not do AI training,” Ms. Ye said. “That field is already saturated with hyperscale cloud providers. It’s unrealistic for us to compete with them.” This decision stems from the company’s own size. Kango has over 30 sites globally, mostly between 10 and 50 megawatts. Too small to satisfy hyperscale cloud providers seeking 100-megawatt parks. But Ms. Ye believes this is perfect for the other half of AI. “For AI inference, you have to deploy in a distributed manner. You have to be close to the customer to reduce latency,” she said. “10 to 50 megawatts is too small for hyperscale cloud providers, but perfect for AI inference.” She then mentioned her favorite statistic. “Over 70% of the electricity in the mining industry is actually owned by individual players, small sites,” Ms. Ye said. “Only 30% is controlled by those publicly traded mining companies.” These small operators own the land and the electricity. They don’t own the AI ​​technology, customers, or funding. Kango wants to bring all of that to them. “We provide a symbiotic relationship for them. We come to the site, bring the AI, and they own the land and the electricity,” she said. “If there’s anything that will allow Kango to establish itself in the AI ​​field over the next three to five years, it’s this symbiotic relationship between these small sites.” EcoLink is the glue. A small site can’t match the always-on uptime of a hyperscale cloud provider, so Kango distributes reliability. “If one side goes down, we can redirect the workload to another site within milliseconds,” Ms. Ye said. The buyers so far are what she calls long-tail customers. These include GPU rental marketplaces like Runpod and Vast.ai, distributed inference clouds like Zenlayer, and AI startups too small to sign hyperscale cloud service provider terms. Price is the attraction: top providers might charge a few dollars per GPU per hour, while marketplaces rent out the same chip for less than a dollar. Ms. Ye says no early test customers signed exclusive agreements, and most renewed. “The customer demand is absolutely real.” Cash Engine, and Costs Kango hasn’t given up on Bitcoin. It’s still running about 31.7 ETH, which generated $98.4 million in mining revenue in the first quarter. This is the cash the company has to keep operating while raising funds for AI. “Most miners just completely abandon Bitcoin mining,” Ms. Ye says. “For us, it’s more of a hybrid approach.” The cleanup is brutal. “We’re basically cleaning up the deck,” Ms. Ye says. “Investors may want to invest in our AI transformation, but they don’t want their money to go towards paying off old debt.” Therefore, Kango sold 6,451 bitcoins, worth about $442 million, and reduced its long-term debt from $557.6 million to $30.6 million in one quarter, a 94.5% decrease. Its Bitcoin reserves dwindled to about 1,000. Subsequently, it raised $75 million for the launch of EcoHash. The first AI node will be deployed at a 50-megawatt site in Georgia that Kango acquired last August for $19.5 million. Ms. Ye calls it a “living showroom.” Two or three more nodes will be online by the end of this year. ## Skeptics Not everyone is buying it. “People are a bit cautious,” Wang said of the AI ​​hype, “because people are worried about a bubble.” The story is years ahead of revenue. Converting a fan-filled warehouse into a liquid-cooled AI data center is prohibitively expensive. Many mining companies saw their stock prices surge due to press releases, but ultimately gained nothing. The company formerly known as Bitfarms saw its stock price rise by hundreds of percentage points after its AI rebranding, but before earning a single dollar in AI revenue. Analysts tracking these transformations constantly warn of the billions of dollars required to complete them. Bitcoin holders have different concerns. As miners shut down their rigs and the network's hashrate has declined, some argue that security costs have been ignored. "Bitcoin miners are abandoning the network for AI funding," a widely circulated X platform post warns. Kango itself has thin buffers. After debt cleanup, it had only $7.2 million in cash at the end of the quarter, and at least one media outlet questioned its NYSE listing. Even landmark deals have faltered: CoreWeave's $9 billion takeover bid for Core Scientific fell through earlier this year. Ms. Ye's response is discipline that runs through everything she says. The mega-sites and iconic training leases will go to the giants. Kango is betting on the rest: the gigawatts of electricity distributed among small, independent miners, and the electricity that the giants can't easily access. 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