Cipher Secures $200M Credit Line as Amazon AI Retrofit Cuts Bitcoin Hashrate
UPDATE: Added details on the planned sale of $30.8 million worth of Bitcoin mining rigs, a $7.4 million write-down on those assets, and additional terms of the $200 million revolving credit facility.
Cipher Digital secured a $200 million revolving credit facility while its Bitcoin mining hashrate continued to fall amid the ongoing conversion of its Black Pearl campus into an Amazon-backed AI infrastructure.
The New York-based company said Tuesday during its first quarter 2026 earnings call that retrofitting work at Black Pearl remains on schedule and that it has sufficient capital to fund the equity portion of its third AI data center campus. Cipher reported first-quarter revenue of $35 million and adjusted EBITDA of negative $48 million.
The financing marks another sign of how lenders are increasingly backing Bitcoin miners, repositioning themselves as AI infrastructure developers, even as their traditional mining operations shrink.
Cipher’s hashrate has dropped by aroudn 50% since last year after the company halted Bitcoin mining operations at Black Pearl in February. The move followed a 15-year lease agreement signed with Amazon in November 2025 to deliver approximately 300 megawatts of turnkey data center capacity at the Texas site.
According to Cipher’s 2025 annual report, the company had only ramped Black Pearl into a major Bitcoin mining operation, commencing mining there in June 2025 and scaling the facility to 150 megawatts by September before pivoting the campus toward AI workloads.
In a quarterly filing released after earnings, Cipher disclosed that it classified approximately $30.8 million of mining rigs as assets held for sale as of March 31, tied to the Black Pearl transition. The company said it has been negotiating sales of the machines following the sublease agreement for the site and expects the rigs to be sold within one year. Cipher also recorded a $7.4 million fair-value loss on the miners during the quarter.
The company’s Odessa facility operated at roughly 11.6 EH/s during the first quarter, according to its earnings presentation, with fleet efficiency improving to about 17.2 J/TH. Cipher mined approximately 346 Bitcoin at Odessa during the quarter and said it replaced around 10,000 older mining rigs with approximately 10,000 Bitmain S21 XP machines relocated from Black Pearl.
Chief Executive Officer Tyler Page described 2026 as “the year of execution” for Cipher, citing progress across both AI infrastructure development and business expansion.
In addition to the Amazon-related retrofit, Cipher said the first building at its Barber Lake data center campus was topped out in April, with electrical, mechanical and networking work ongoing. The company also signed a third AI data center campus lease with an unnamed investment-grade hyperscale tenant during the quarter.
Additional details in the filing showed Cipher’s new revolving credit facility was arranged with Morgan Stanley Senior Funding as administrative agent alongside a syndicate of lenders. The four-year facility includes an additional $50 million accordion option and initially carries pricing of 175 basis points over Term SOFR for floating-rate borrowings, implying an effective interest rate of roughly 6% based on current SOFR levels.
Borrowing availability is initially capped at $50 million prior to the commencement of operations at Barber Lake and Black Pearl, and the company had no outstanding borrowings under the facility as of March 31.
The agreement also requires Cipher to maintain minimum liquidity thresholds ranging from $100 million to $200 million depending on the operational status of its HPC campuses. Each borrowing is additionally conditioned on the company meeting a minimum market capitalization requirement.
