Cipher Mining secures $50 million investment from Stargate AI backer SoftBank

Cipher Mining has secured a $50 million investment from the $300 billion Japanese multinational conglomerate SoftBank, which is set to purchase approximately 10.4 million shares of the bitcoin miner’s common stock.

The funding is structured as a private investment in public equity, with the capital used to support Cipher’s high-performance computing and AI data center infrastructure business, according to a statement from the company on Thursday.

In an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Cipher said it has also signed a one-month exclusivity agreement with SoftBank, preventing it from selling or making deals with other parties for its 300 MW Barber Lake site in Texas.

“We are thrilled to welcome SoftBank as an important investor in Cipher,” Cipher Mining CEO Tyler Page said. “This investment comes at a pivotal moment in Cipher’s growth trajectory, as the company continues to attract attention for its pipeline of sites and innovative solutions in industrial-scale data centers.”

Cipher, the tenth largest public bitcoin miner, with a market cap of $1.6 billion, is among a growing set of mining firms increasingly looking to diversify their operations into AI data center hosting, hoping to reduce the volatility associated with bitcoin’s market cycles while benefitting from a wave of demand for artificial intelligence solutions.

Shares in AI diversifiers outperformed their pure-play Bitcoin mining rivals last year. However, it has not all been plain sailing, with Cipher among the worst-hit stocks following the DeepSeek-fueled market dislocation on Monday.

‘A sign of things to come’

Although $50 million does not go very far in the development of HPC data center infrastructure, the SoftBank investment could be a “sign of things to come” for the bitcoin mining industry subset looking to diversify into AI, analysts at JPMorgan said in a note to clients on Friday.

“Shares of bitcoin miners with HPC exposure declined as much as 30% earlier this week as part of a broader sell-off in AI related stocks,” the analysts said. “This deal was in the works well ahead of the DeepSeek news this week; nonetheless we think it validates continued demand and interest in large sites with power agreements in place”

Cipher Mining acquired the Barber Lake 300 MW site in September 2024 and already has a power agreement and sub-station on site — making it a particularly attractive asset for hyperscalers (large-scale cloud service providers), JPMorgan noted, alongside a slew of other sites in various stages of construction totaling up to 2.6 GW.

JPMorgan is a market maker or liquidity provider in financial instruments related to Cipher Mining and may hold a position in the company's debt securities.

President Trump-announced Stargate AI initiative

SoftBank has been aggressively expanding its AI and cloud computing investments, recently backing the Stargate Project, a four-year, $500 billion AI infrastructure initiative in collaboration with OpenAI, Oracle and Emirati investment firm MGX, and the U.S. government playing a supportive role.

The project, announced shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, begins with a $100 billion AI data center rollout in the U.S. Additionally, SoftBank is in talks to invest between $15 billion and $25 billion directly into OpenAI.

“SoftBank’s focus on innovation in technology and AI development aligns with our vision to establish ourselves as a leader in HPC data center development,” Cipher’s Page said.