NEW YORK, Jan 16, 2026, 12:19 PM EST — Regular session
- Cipher Mining shares rise about 11% in midday trade, extending a sector-wide rally in crypto-linked stocks
- Riot Platforms’ new 10-year data-center lease with AMD sharpens the AI hosting theme for miners
- Bitcoin slips about 2% as U.S. lawmakers delay a crypto market-structure markup
Cipher Mining Inc (CIFR) shares jumped on Friday, up 11.4% at $19.52 in midday trading, as investors piled back into bitcoin miners and power-hungry data-center developers. Trading volume topped 26 million shares.
The rally matters because miners are trying to sell something steadier than bitcoin rewards: power and space for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, the server-heavy plumbing behind AI. A single long lease can change how investors model cash flow — and how they price risk.
Bitcoin, though, was moving the other way. It was down about 1.8% at roughly $94,824, after U.S. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott said a planned markup of digital-asset market structure legislation would be postponed as talks continue. “Everyone remains at the table,” Scott said. 1
Friday’s spark across the group came from Riot Platforms, a bigger peer that is pushing hard into data centers. Riot said it signed a 10-year lease and services agreement with Advanced Micro Devices for 25 megawatts of “critical IT load” — the power actually delivered to servers — with options that could take total leased capacity to 200 MW. AMD CIO Hasmukh Ranjan said the company needs partners that “match our pace and scale.” 2
Cipher has been selling a similar pivot, even while it still runs bitcoin mines. In December, it said it bought a 200-megawatt site in Ohio and that its development pipeline totaled 3.4 gigawatts across eight sites. “Hyperscalers are driving unprecedented demand for large-scale sites,” Cipher CEO Tyler Page said at the time. 3
Earlier this month, Cipher also named Lee Bratcher head of policy and government affairs and Drew Armstrong head of strategic initiatives, part of a build-out aimed at the “AI and HPC data center” market, Page said in a company statement. 4
The broader crypto equity bid has been choppy. On Wednesday, bitcoin briefly pushed above $97,000 for the first time since November, and miner stocks rallied sharply alongside it, according to Decrypt. 5
On Friday, the move looked less about bitcoin’s tape and more about the “AI hosting” trade. Riot was up 12.7%, Marathon Digital gained about 6.5%, CleanSpark rose roughly 7.5% and IREN climbed about 11.5% in midday trading.
But this trade cuts both ways. Miners still swing with bitcoin’s price and network economics, and the shift into AI hosting can demand heavy upfront spending and long construction timelines — especially when companies have to retrofit or build out power and cooling for dense servers.
Regulatory uncertainty is another overhang. A Senate Banking Committee executive session set for Jan. 15 to consider H.R.3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, was listed as postponed. 6
For Cipher, the next hard dates on the calendar are investor conferences: the Jefferies Power, Energy, Clean Energy & Utilities Conference on March 2 and the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference running March 3–5, the company said. 7
