Cipher Shares Rally as Bitcoin Mining Exit Gains Momentum

Cipher announced on 23 Feb it had sold its 49% stake in the Alborz, Bear and Chief joint-venture mining sites in West Texas, plus select rigs from its Black Pearl site, in an all-stock transaction valued at roughly $40mn with mining-hardware maker Canaan.

Speaking on the firm's earnings call, CEO Tyler Page framed the deal as a clean break from further mining spend. "Given our desire for no further capital investment into Bitcoin mining… Canaan is the most natural buyer," he said. 

Investors back pivot

The positive market reaction came even as Cipher posted a messy quarter on paper. For the fourth quarter of 2025, the company reported $60mn in revenue and a GAAP net loss of $734mn.

Management said the result was largely driven by non-cash items tied to its business transition, including a roughly $450mn mark-to-market loss connected to the embedded derivative liability in its 2031 convertible notes.  

The company also recorded a $96mn write-down related to miners moved into "held for sale," plus a $45mn impairment at its Odessa facility tied to a "depressed hash price," management said on the earnings call.

Despite the losses, Cipher emphasized that it retained ample liquidity and funding visibility. CFO Gregory Mumford said the company ended the year with $754mn of unrestricted liquidity, $628mn in cash and $125mn in Bitcoin. 

A deliberate exit  

Cipher’s near-term plan is to run down its Bitcoin exposure, with plans to sell its entire 1,166 BTC stash by the end of the year, Page said. 

After decommissioning Black Pearl rigs and exiting the mining sites, Cipher’s Bitcoin operations will be concentrated at its facility in Odessa, Texas, while it evaluates a potential conversion to high-performance computing. 

"We don’t have a desire to put more Capex into Bitcoin mining. That is not going to happen," Page said on the call.  

Cipher’s shift comes after a year in which many public miners were forced to defend margins amid rising prices, and those dynamics have hit home harder as prices plunged in the first two months of 2026.

For miners, weaker Bitcoin prices are only part of the challenge. Rising network competition and mining difficulty have further squeezed margins, pushing many operators to pivot toward data center leasing in search of steadier cash flows. 

Cipher said it has locked in 600 megawatts of AI data center capacity under long-term deals: a 15-year agreement with Amazon Web Services and a 10-year lease with Fluidstack, backed in large part by Google. 

Together, the contracts are expected to generate about $9.3bn in revenue over their initial terms, with roughly $669mn in average annual operating income.