Cipher Stock Rises as Bitcoin Miner Boosts Debt Offering to $1.1 Billion Following Google Deal

Bitcoin miner Cipher Mining on Friday announced it had upped the price of its convertible debt offering, one day after revealing a $3 billion AI cloud hosting deal backstopped by Google.

The Nasdaq-listed miner said its convertible senior notes were now priced at $1.1 billion after initially being offered for $800 million.

The notes will be for “persons reasonably believed to be qualified institutional buyers,” and will be due in 2031. Senior notes are a form of debt a company can issue to investors. Convertible notes can be turned into company equity by the buyer. 

Cipher’s stock (CIFR) was trading up by nearly 5% on Friday at a price around $12.20 a share, after falling sharply on Thursday following an initial spike at the start of the trading. CIFR has nearly pulled even on the week after being significantly down earlier in the day.

The company on Thursday announced that it signed a 10-year, roughly $3 billion high-performance computing colocation agreement with Fluidstack. The deal will see Cipher deliver 168 MW of critical IT load, supported by a maximum of 244 MW of gross capacity, at its Barber Lake site in Colorado City, Texas.

As part of the deal, Google said it would backstop $1.4 billion of Fluidstack’s lease obligations to support project-related debt financing. In return, the tech giant will receive warrants to acquire approximately 24 million shares of Cipher common stock, or a 5.4% pro forma equity ownership stake.

In the Bitcoin mining world, companies use warehouses full of computers to process transactions on the crypto network. Because they’ve amassed so much computing power, some miners have pivoted their infrastructure to address growing AI demand.

Experts previously told Decrypt that while both industries use data centers, it can be difficult to make the swing from AI to crypto mining. 

Bitcoin miner TeraWulf announced in August that Google was providing an incremental $1.4 billion backstop to support project-related debt financing, upping its total stake to $3.2 billion.