NEW YORK, January 2, 2026, 04:45 ET — Premarket
Cipher Mining Inc shares were up 1.1% at $14.76 in pre-market trading on Friday, tracking a firmer bitcoin price heading into the first U.S. session of 2026. Bitcoin was up about 1.5% at $89,038.
The early move comes after a volatile finish to 2025 for crypto, when bitcoin was on track for its first annual loss since 2022, weighed by shifting risk sentiment and macro cross-currents, a Reuters report late Wednesday said. “bitcoin increasingly exhibits the characteristics of a risk asset,” said Linh Tran, a senior market analyst at XS.com. Reuters
That matters now because miners trade like high-beta equities: they can amplify the market’s swings rather than dampen them. When risk appetite wobbles, the group often moves sharply even on modest coin moves.
Cipher’s core business is bitcoin mining, which means near-term expectations can hinge on bitcoin’s price and operating costs such as power. Higher coin prices can lift revenue expectations, while declines tend to pressure margins.
Moves were mixed across U.S.-listed miners ahead of the bell. Marathon Digital was down 3.6%, Riot Platforms slipped 0.4% and CleanSpark fell 2.9%, while TeraWulf rose 2.9%; Core Scientific and IREN were also lower.
Investors also continue to weigh Cipher’s push beyond mining into high-performance computing (HPC), which uses dense server racks to run AI and other data-heavy workloads. In a November SEC filing, the company said it signed an approximately $5.5 billion, 15-year lease agreement with Amazon Web Services to provide turnkey space and power for AI workloads, with 300 megawatts of capacity planned for delivery in 2026.
A separate SEC filing described an amended lease tied to Cipher’s Barber Lake facility in Texas with Fluidstack, with Google as a counterparty in related agreements. The filing said the deal covered 168 MW of “critical IT load” — a measure of how much electricity can run servers — and added 39 MW in a second phase, with Phase I expected to be delivered by September 2026 and Phase II by January 2027. SEC
Those long-dated data-center contracts are designed to reduce reliance on bitcoin’s boom-and-bust cycle, but execution risk stays front and center. Traders will watch buildout timelines, power availability and financing steps as projects convert from plans into operating capacity.
In the near term, the tether to bitcoin still dominates daily tape-reading. With bitcoin hovering around $89,000, traders are watching whether the coin can regain and hold the $90,000 level as liquidity returns after the holiday break.
Macro catalysts sit in the background for crypto-linked equities because rate expectations can shift risk appetite quickly. A Reuters “Take Five” preview flagged the U.S. jobs report on Jan. 9 as an early test for markets at the start of the year. Reuters
For Cipher, the next company-specific swing factors are likely to be quarterly results and operational updates, including bitcoin production and progress on data-center construction. Any change in timelines or funding assumptions around the AI hosting buildouts could reprice the stock fast.
