Cipher Mining’s stock jumped by 19% after announcing a $5.5 billion, 15-year data center lease deal with AWS for AI workloads

Cipher Mining’s stock climbed up over 19% in early trading after the Bitcoin miner announced a $5.5 billion lease agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS), extending the rally that has made the Nasdaq-listed company one of the biggest beneficiaries of Wall Street’s growing appetite for AI-linked exposure.

The deal, which rewards Cipher Mining’s pivot into high-performance computing and artificial-intelligence infrastructure, is a 15-year lease agreement and will see the company provide data center space and power capacity for AWS for its artificial-intelligence workloads.

Under the deal, Cipher will deliver 300 megawatts of capacity and also comes with both air- and liquid-cooled infrastructure, beginning in July 2026, with lease payments starting in August that year.

The announcement came alongside Cipher’s third-quarter earnings release and also adds to a growing list of major partnerships, such as the hosting agreements it has with Fluidstack and Google, bringing Cipher’s total AI-related lease commitments to roughly $8.5 billion.

From crypto mines to AI engines

With energy-intensive Bitcoin mining facing profitability pressure from volatile token prices and rising electricity costs, firms such as Cipher are redeploying their assets toward long-term hosting revenue.

Cipher’s chief executive officer, Tyler Page, reportedly stated that the latest partnership validates their thesis “that Tier 1 hyperscalers would turn to Cipher.”

The company also unveiled plans for a new 1 gigawatt development in West Texas called Colchis, a 620-acre site adjacent to an existing substation. Cipher said it will hold most of the ownership equity of the project, which will be connected directly to the American Electric Power grid and is expected to go live in 2028.

The Colchis project, together with the AWS agreement, adds to Cipher’s total development pipeline of 3.2 gigawatts of capacity. 

Investors reward Cipher’s pivot

Cipher reported a third-quarter net loss of $3 million, which is a major improvement from last year’s $86 million loss. 

The company’s stronger cash position and long-term contract visibility were enough to encourage investors and boost the share price. The AWS lease alone, analysts noted, could generate steady revenue over the next decade and a half, offering better predictability than the cyclical and dwindling revenues of crypto mining.

Cipher is not alone in the Monday stock rally as another miner, IREN, announced the same day a $9.7 billion hardware-supply deal with Microsoft for AI cloud services. This led to IREN’s stock going up by over 20%.

Betting on the AI infrastructure boom

The partnership with AWS positions Cipher as a key player in meeting the energy and data center demands of artificial intelligence, where capacity constraints have become a bottleneck for global expansion. 

Tech giants such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all turned to external infrastructure providers to secure scalable, energy-efficient sites capable of running AI workloads.

By leveraging its existing energy contracts and experience operating in high-power environments, Cipher aims to capture part of that demand. The AWS project will not generate revenue until 2026, and large-scale developments such as Colchis carry substantial construction and financing challenges.

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