Cipher: The Miner That Dropped the Word

Where did Cipher come from?

From Bitfury, the Amsterdam maker of mining hardware, which in March 2021 announced it would take a newly formed mining subsidiary public through a special-purpose acquisition company at a $2 billion enterprise value with $595 million of expected proceeds, including a $425 million private placement to which Bitfury contributed $50 million in kind.^[1] The deal closed August 27, 2021. Cipher listed with no operating mine, a New York headquarters, Tyler Page as chief executive, a seven-year services agreement with its parent that barred Bitfury from mining in the United States, and Bitfury holding about 83% of the shares - a “controlled company” under Nasdaq's rules, as every annual report through 2023 said.^[2][4][3] Twenty-six people worked there at the end of 2022.^[4]

Its Texas began in the wind. Alborz, 40 megawatts near Happy in the Panhandle, drew its entire supply from an adjacent wind project under a joint venture with WindHQ on a five-year contract at 2.73 cents; Page put the effective price at “roughly $17 per megawatt-hour.” Bear and Chief, near Andrews, followed in October 2022, each 49% Cipher's.^[7][4] The company sold its share of all three to Canaan, the Chinese rig maker, for $39.75 million of Canaan stock in February 2026.^[28]

What is the Odessa contract, and why was it worth more unused?

Odessa is 207 megawatts in Ector County on a fixed-price power purchase agreement with Luminant, a Vistra subsidiary, signed June 23, 2021 at about 2.7 cents a kilowatt-hour. The mine began hashing on November 29, 2022, “just 10 months after we broke ground,” and the company valued the contract on its balance sheet at $78.9 million because, in its own words, it had the flexibility “to either mine bitcoin or resell power.”^[6] Eleven days before the first block, Luminant had sued it in the 95th District Court in Dallas County over two payments totalling about $6.7 million.^[4]

The 2022 numbers explain the contract better than any prospectus. Mining revenue was $3.0 million. Money from the “reduction of scheduled power” - selling the cheap electricity back when the market paid more than the hashrate did - was $5.06 million.^[5] The suit settled on August 23, 2023 with a fourth amendment that cut the notice Cipher must give before curtailing from two hours to “at most, ten minutes” and extended the Odessa lease through July 2027.^[8] Power sales were $9.9 million in 2023.^[11] By 2025 Odessa was 11.3 exahash and 56% of production, running at 17.6 joules a terahash, and the 10-K describes the contract as take-or-pay on two-thirds of the site at about 2.8 cents after an October 2025 adjustment.^[22][31] In August 2026 Page told analysts he was “encouraged by the level of interest we're seeing in conversion of Odessa to an HPC site.”^[40] The last mine is for lease.

How did a miner become Amazon's landlord?

By buying substations. Black Pearl, at least fifty acres in Winkler County with ERCOT approval for 300 megawatts, was bought in December 2023 for about 2.4 million shares, worth about $7 million.^[10] Barber Lake, 250 acres at Colorado City in Mitchell County with an energized substation, closed September 24, 2024 for $67.5 million and $3 a megawatt-hour for five years; the release announcing a 300-megawatt Bitcoin site said in the same breath that “we have already received interest in the site from multiple hyperscalers.”^[13][14] Options were taken in October 2024 on three more 500-megawatt sites, in McLennan County, West Texas, and East Texas.^[31]

Then the tenants came, in an order the company had not planned. On September 25, 2025 Fluidstack leased 168 megawatts of IT load at Barber Lake for ten years and about $3.0 billion, with Google backstopping $1.4 billion of the rent and taking warrants for about 5.4% of Cipher; five days later Cipher sold $1.3 billion of zero-coupon convertible notes.^[19][20] On November 3 Amazon Web Services took Black Pearl - a site that had been hashing at 10.1 exahash - for fifteen years and about $5.5 billion, and the stock rose 19%. Page: the hyperscalers “would turn to Cipher and to non-traditional areas in Texas.”^[21][22][23] On November 20 Fluidstack took the rest of Barber Lake for $830 million more, with Google's backstop raised to $1.73 billion.^[24] A third lease disclosed in May 2026 to an “investment-grade hyperscale tenant” turned out, in June offering documents, to be Amazon again, at Stingray near Andrews, with an Amazon.com guarantee of the rent.^[33][35][36] On September 25, 2026 the Barber Lake term was extended to twenty years with a binding follow-on from an unnamed “leading AI lab,” and the one site's contracted revenue passed $9 billion.^[49] The company counts about $11.4 billion in all.^[39]

The buildings were paid for with debt: $1.3 billion of converts in September 2025, $2.0 billion of 6.125% notes in February 2026 to finish Black Pearl, $810 million of 6% notes in June for Stingray, $6.0 billion of principal by June 30, 2026.^{[20][26][36][41]} The first Black Pearl capacity was delivered to Amazon in August 2026, two months early, and the rent began.^[38]

What is Cipher's record with the grid and the state?

Until 2026, almost none in public. No Cipher witness appears on the Senate list for SB 1751 in March 2023, when Riot and US Bitcoin testified against the brake and the Texas Blockchain Council testified on it; the company's grid record was the Odessa contract's curtailment clause and the industry-wide curtailment in Winter Storm Fern in January 2026, for which it published no figure.^[50][51] That changed on January 6, 2026, when it hired Lee Bratcher, who had founded the council in 2019 and run it for six years, as head of policy and government affairs, to “represent Cipher in its ERCOT membership.”^[25] Bratcher is on his own page; the council is on its own.

The Governor's August 3, 2026 directive paused ERCOT's Batch Zero - the batch of roughly 300 large loads awaiting classification - pending “a verification process before advancing any data center Large Loads.”^[37][42] Page, the next day: “Whatever the finalized process and timeline looks like here, Cipher is going to be at the front of it.”^[40] The conditional designations arrived in mid-September: base load for Colchis's gigawatt in Tom Green County and Stingray's 100 megawatts, studied load for Apollo's 900 near San Antonio, McLennan's and Mikeska's 500 each, and a second Stingray phase - 3.2 gigawatts conditionally classed, on top of 807 operating.^[43][45][46] Bratcher briefed Tom Green County's commissioners on September 22: 300 acres owned with options to 600, a $17 million fee paid toward AEP's Red Creek 345-kilovolt substation, no abatement requested, and a promise that “you won't be able to hear this data center from the property line.”^[47][48] The substation's construction is in what the local paper called “regulatory limbo pending Governor Abbott's large-load audit.”^[48] The audit is due December 10.

The honest counterweight: the ledger, the parent, and the neighbors

Three things. First, the ledger. Cipher has never had a profitable year. It lost $822.2 million in 2025 and $381.8 million in the first half of 2026, its fourth-quarter revenue missed estimates by a quarter and sent the stock down with 19% of the float sold short, its hashrate was cut in half by the conversions, its bitcoin holdings fell from 1,433 to 646 in six months, and it owes $6 billion on buildings whose rent has mostly not yet begun.^{[29][30][38][41]} Its chief executive was paid $17.3 million for 2024 and $15.0 million for 2025 at a company that reported 49 employees for the pay-ratio calculation and a median employee at $608,805.^[18][32] Second, the parent. Bitfury controlled the company for its first three years and sold down from 83% to 15% as the stock rose, in block sales, a distribution to its own staff, and open-market sales through 2025; the board observer agreement it held was terminated in July 2025.^[9][15][32] The filings say the company is no longer controlled. They also say Google holds warrants that expire in 2030 and an option to become a shareholder of a company whose largest tenant it backstops.^[19][31] Third, the neighbors. The Waco Bridge reported in May 2026 that the McLennan site is 300 acres at Riesel bought seven months earlier, that a page called “Stop the Riesel Data Center” exists, and that a county commissioner rated the company's transparency “not very good right now.”^[34] Colorado City's well pump failed in July; in September Cipher, Fluidstack, and Anthropic put $10 million into a fund to fix the town's water system, and the mayor confirmed the site is not a city water customer. Page: “Being a good neighbor means showing up for the issues that matter most to the communities where we operate, even when those issues predate us.” A reader of the local paper called it “the good old art of bribery.”^[44][45] The other side of the counterweight is real: the company asked Tom Green County for no abatement, paid its own interconnection, and is the only company in this wing whose Texas sites have no nuisance suit, no county resolution, and no material litigation in its filings.^[47][31]

The fair reading is that Cipher was never really a Bitcoin company so much as a power-contract company that mined while it waited for a better tenant, found three, and dropped the word when it no longer described the business - and that the state has yet to decide whether the three gigawatts it has been promised belong on the grid.

Where does Cipher stand today?

As of September 30, 2026: 807 megawatts operating at Odessa, Black Pearl, and Barber Lake; 3.2 gigawatts conditionally classed and awaiting the December 10 audit; $11.4 billion of contracted rent against $6.0 billion of debt; about 11.6 exahash at one mine whose power contract ends in July 2027; 646 bitcoin; a twenty-year lease signed five days ago; and the founder of the Texas Blockchain Council briefing county commissioners on its behalf.^{[46][43][39][41][49][47]} The other companies in the wing are on Riot Platforms and Texas, MARA Holdings and Texas, and Core Scientific and Texas; the pivot is on the Texas miners' AI pivot; the sites are on the Texas Bitcoin mining map. This page is the miner that dropped the word, and what it kept.