Cango Sold 60% of Its Bitcoin to Pay Down Debt and Is Now Betting the Business on AI Infrastructure

Cango Inc. is in the middle of a forced reinvention. The company sold 4,451 Bitcoin over the weekend of February 7 and 8, generating approximately $305 million in proceeds that went entirely toward repaying a Bitcoin-collateralized loan.

According to CoinDesk report, the sale cut its BTC reserves by roughly 60%, dropping holdings to approximately 3,313 BTC by the end of February. Shares fell over 23% on March 17 following the release of full-year financial results that laid bare why the pivot was not optional.

The Numbers That Made This Inevitable

Cango reported $688.1 million in revenue for full year 2025 alongside a $452.8 million net loss. That ratio, generating significant revenue while losing two thirds of it, reflects a mining operation whose cost structure had become untenable relative to market prices.

The all-in cost to mine a single Bitcoin reached $106,251 in the fourth quarter of 2025. Bitcoin was trading well below that level for much of that period. A company spending $106,000 to produce an asset worth less than that on the open market is not running a business. It is running a cash destruction machine with Bitcoin-shaped outputs. The collateralized loan sitting on top of that cost structure created the urgency. Selling Bitcoin to repay a Bitcoin-backed loan while simultaneously losing money mining Bitcoin is a position with no good exits, only less bad ones.

The $305 million in proceeds addressed the immediate debt pressure but left the company with a diminished BTC position and a mining operation that still faces the same fundamental cost problem. At $106,251 per coin to mine, Cango needs Bitcoin to trade significantly above current levels near $73,500 at the time of writing for its mining business to generate positive margins. That gap is not closing quickly.

The AI Pivot

Rather than wait for Bitcoin prices to bail out the mining economics, Cango is retrofitting its global mining sites into an integrated energy and AI compute platform. The strategic logic is straightforward even if the execution risk is substantial. Mining facilities are built around three things: cheap power, significant cooling infrastructure, and high-density compute hardware. Those same attributes are precisely what AI inference workloads require.

The first phase focuses on deploying modular containerized GPU nodes to provide AI inference capacity targeting small and medium-sized enterprises. That SME focus is a market positioning choice. Hyperscaler AI compute is dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Cango is not competing at that level. It is targeting the long tail of businesses that need GPU capacity without the enterprise contracts and minimum commitments that come with hyperscaler relationships.

To lead the GPU cluster deployment, Cango appointed Jack Jin as Chief Technology Officer for its AI business line. Jin previously held an executive role at Zoom Communications, bringing software infrastructure experience to what has been a hardware-focused operation.

What the Market Is Saying

Shares near 52-week lows and a 23% single-day decline following the financial results publication reflects a market that is skeptical the pivot will work quickly enough to matter. The 2025 loss of $452.8 million is not a small miss. It is a structural indictment of the business model that existed before the AI repositioning. Investors are being asked to look past a year of heavy losses, a forced Bitcoin sale, and a management team now trying to compete in AI infrastructure against companies that have been building that capability for years.

The Cango story sits at an uncomfortable intersection of two major themes running through the market this week. Bitcoin treasury strategies have been celebrated across multiple companies including Strategy, Metaplanet, and Bitmine, all of which are accumulating BTC as a long-term asset. Cango is moving in the opposite direction, liquidating Bitcoin under financial pressure while pivoting toward AI, the other dominant institutional narrative of the moment. The difference between those two postures is not strategic philosophy. It is balance sheet strength. Companies that can afford to hold Bitcoin are holding it. Companies that cannot are selling it and hoping the next bet works out better.

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