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Cipher Mining Inc. CIFR

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The bet you're really making is that Cipher takes the cheap-power sites where it mines bitcoin and rents them to big AI companies to run their chips, and gets paid before the loans come due. You're betting it signs one of those giant rental deals soon, because it has already borrowed 5.4 billion dollars to put up the buildings and the mining money is drying up. Right now it looks shaky: mining sales fell to 25 million dollars last quarter, near the lowest in available quarters and down 43% from a year earlier, and the company lost 268 million. You pay about 15 times the value of what it owns, more than double the stock's previous five-year high and roughly five times what rivals cost.

Key data

Price$17.74
52-week range$7.17 – $30.14
P/E (trailing / FY2028)neg / 202x
Price / book14.7x

CIFR · price with moving averages

Daily · 6MWeekly · 3Y
$0$8$16$23$31 Sep '23Apr '24Nov '24Jul '25Feb '26Sep '26 BID
EMAs82140

Source: market data.

The business

Cipher runs warehouses full of computers next to cheap electricity, mostly in west Texas. Until recently every machine did one job: mine bitcoin, racing to earn new coins. That business is fading. The reward per machine was halved in 2024, mining got more crowded, and last quarter it brought in just $24.8M, down 43% from a year earlier and near the lowest quarterly revenue in the company's recent history. So Cipher is doing what much of its industry is doing, converting those power-connected sites into data centers it can lease to artificial-intelligence firms that need somewhere to run their chips. It holds land and enough grid power, measured in megawatts, that a single large tenant would dwarf everything mining earns. The moat, such as it is, is the power itself: interconnection queues run years, and Cipher already holds the plug. What it does not yet hold is a signed anchor tenant.

Inside the complete Back of Napkin

  1. 01The business
  2. 02The numbers
  3. 03Management
  4. 04How it fails or surprises you
  5. 05Closing thoughts
  6. 06Methodology

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