Shares of Cipher Digital jumped 6.4% to $23.89 Monday after its subsidiary launched an $810 million bond offering to build yet another data center for Amazon — the third such deal in less than a year, and a bet that the company's reinvention from Bitcoin miner to AI landlord can outrun its ballooning debt load.
Amazon Keeps Signing, and Cipher Keeps Building. The new Stingray facility is a 70-megawatt high-performance computing data center in Andrews, Texas, fully pre-leased to Amazon Data Services under a long-term triple-net agreement that includes annual rent increases and provisions for Amazon to cover construction cost overruns above a set cap.
This is Cipher's second major data center lease with AWS, underpinning what the company says could amount to several billion dollars in contracted lease revenue. For shareholders, the key word is contracted: Amazon's investment-grade guarantee turns speculative construction into something closer to a toll road backed by one of the world's most creditworthy companies.
The Debt Pile Is Getting Hard to Ignore. Cipher already carried $5.2 billion in total debt principal at March 31 — predominantly nonrecourse and tied to project assets — alongside $715 million in unrestricted cash and $76 million in Bitcoin. Adding $810 million pushes total debt past $6 billion against a market capitalization of roughly $10.5 billion. Management calls this "nonrecourse financing through construction," meaning if a project fails, lenders eat the loss — not the parent company. But Cipher still provides a completion guarantee, committing to fund the project as necessary to ensure timely completion if note proceeds prove insufficient.
Revenue Is Tiny — For Now. Q1 revenue was just $35 million, down from $60 million the prior quarter, as Bitcoin mining at the Black Pearl site wound down ahead of the data center conversion.
H.C. Wainwright raised its price target to $30, citing data center lease revenues expected to start in Q4 2026, while Bernstein and Jefferies both initiated at buy-equivalent ratings with $32 targets. The bull case hinges entirely on rent checks arriving on schedule.
Insider Selling Adds a Wrinkle. Bitfury-linked entities, Cipher's largest shareholders, sold roughly $47.9 million in stock on June 3 — the same week the company announced this offering. That doesn't scream panic, but it does raise a question: if insiders are trimming at $26, how much upside is truly left at $24?