Bitcoin mining company Cipher Mining soared more than 32% after revealing a new 15-year deal with tech giant Amazon, adding to the wave of partnerships between big tech companies and crypto miners.
A 15-year lease agreement with Amazon Web Services worth $5.5 billion requires Cipher to provide turnkey space and power for AI workloads in two phases starting in July and August next year, the Bitcoin (BTC) miner announced on Monday.
Cipher Mining also significantly narrowed its net loss to $3 million in the third quarter and increased adjusted profit by $41 million, compared to a net loss of $46 million and adjusted profit of $30 million in the previous quarter.
This caused Cipher’s stock price to soar 32% during Monday trading from $18.65 to a high of $24.80, before settling at $22.76 by the end of the trading day.
sauce: crypto mining
Since the April 2024 halving, which reduced mining rewards to 3.125 Bitcoins and eroded overall profitability, Bitcoin miners have increasingly diversified their income sources by shifting energy capacity to AI and HPC hosting services.
Cipher and Google also do business
In September, Google acquired a 5.4% stake in Cipher Mining as part of a $3 billion, multi-year data center deal with AI data center company Fluidstack.
Cipher CEO Tyler Page said in a statement Monday that the company has “completed pivotal transactions with Fluidstack and Google, solidifying our credibility in the HPC space.”
“We are now taking another major step forward following this transaction by signing our first direct lease with a Tier 1 hyperscaler,” he added.
In addition to the deal with Amazon, Cipher also announced that it has a majority stake in a joint venture to develop a 1 gigawatt AI hosting site in West Texas known as Colchis. Under the deal, Cipher will provide the majority of the funding and receive 95% equity ownership.
Miners and tech giants doing business
Big tech has increased its involvement with Bitcoin miners this year. Bitcoin mining company IREN also signed a multi-year GPU cloud services contract with Microsoft on Monday worth $9.7 billion.
Meanwhile, TeraWulf announced in August that it had signed a $3.7 billion hosting deal with Fluidstack, with backing from Google’s parent company Alphabet.
