Canaan will deliver 4.5 megawatts (MW) of water cooled Bitcoin mining ASICs to a Japanese electrical engineering company for a grid stability pilot. The equipment will be Canaan’s Avalon A1566HA 488T units, built to support real time grid balancing and energy efficiency optimization. The Japanese partner was not named. The project is framed as an energy use case, not only as a mining expansion.
The mining site will stay online but will not work at a fixed power level. Instead, it will operate as a controllable load that grid operators can adjust. This allows the power system to use Bitcoin mining as a tool when supply and demand move during the day.
Canaan said the goal is to show that Bitcoin mining can run continuously and still match power availability in Japan’s regional grids.
How the Bitcoin mining rigs will balance the grid
The deployment will use Canaan’s proprietary control system to change frequency, voltage and hashrate. When the grid has surplus energy, the system can overclock the ASICs. When demand rises, it can underclock them. This keeps the miners active while lowering or raising consumption.
This model fits real time grid balancing, where operators must keep frequency and voltage inside safe ranges. Japan’s rising renewable energy share and uneven consumption create short periods of excess and short periods of tight supply. A fast, digital load such as Bitcoin mining can respond without starting new generation.
The water cooled design helps the rigs stay stable while the system changes power intake, which is necessary for 24/7 operation in an energy environment.
Canaan links Japan to earlier Netherlands project
Canaan’s chairman and CEO Nangeng Zhang said the Japanese work “builds on a similar initiative we supported in the Netherlands last year.” He added that “utilities can leverage Bitcoin mining as a digital load balancer, improving both energy sustainability and grid efficiency.” The statement shows Canaan is offering mining hardware as demand response infrastructure.
By providing both the Avalon A1566HA 488T units and the control layer, Canaan turns a standard mining setup into a grid facing Bitcoin mining asset that can react to power signals.
The report noted that Bitcoin mining is already used for load balancing in other markets. A January report by the Digital Assets Research Institute said mining activity helped the Texas grid and may have saved the state up to 18 billion dollars by removing the need for gas peaker plants. Earlier this week, Brazilian solar producer Thopen said it is exploring Bitcoin mining to absorb surplus energy from renewables.