Shares of Cipher Digital (CIFR) rose more than 10% to $16.40 in early Wednesday trading after the company outlined a new AI data center lease and fresh financing.

The bitcoin miner-turned-HPC developer said it signed a 15-year lease with an unnamed hyperscale customer, its third such campus deal, and secured a revolving credit facility worth up to $200 million.

The facility, which can expand by another $50 million, was undrawn at closing and runs through March 2030. It’s priced off SOFR, a short-term interest rate benchmark, giving Cipher a relatively flexible source of capital as it continues building out data center capacity.

The update adds to a growing stack of long-term AI contracts that have reshaped the company over the past year.

AI pivot plays

Like many of its peers, Cipher has been moving away from a pure-play bitcoin mining model and toward leasing power and infrastructure to AI and cloud providers.

That shift accelerated late last year when the company signed a $5.5 billion, 15-year deal with Amazon Web Services and began developing a 1 gigawatt data center site in Texas. It later expanded its relationship with Fluidstack, bringing total contracted HPC revenue into the multi-billion-dollar range.

More recently, Cipher also sold its stake in certain West Texas mining joint ventures to Canaan in a roughly $40 million stock deal while continuing to reposition some of its sites toward AI workloads.

The latest lease suggests demand from large compute customers remains intact, even as competition for power-heavy infrastructure ramps up.

Despite Wednesday’s move, CIFR remains below its late-2025 peak.

The stock is still down roughly 35% from its November high near $25, according to The Block price data, though it has gained more than 430% over the past year, showing that investors still have an appetite for miners with credible AI exposure.