Cipher, Fluidstack and Anthropic Pledge $10M for Texas Town’s Water System
Cipher Digital (NASDAQ: CIFR), Fluidstack and Anthropic committed $10 million to repair and expand Colorado City’s water system in West Texas, where Cipher is developing its Barber Lake data center.
The money will support additional water storage, replacement of aging valves and other projects selected by city officials, the companies said on Monday. A new nonprofit, the Colorado City Water Infrastructure Foundation, will administer the funding in partnership with local leaders. The announcement did not specify each company’s contribution or a completion timetable.
The pledge follows July thunderstorms that knocked out power and backup generators at a city well-pump station, causing water pressure to collapse, according to local outlet San Angelo LIVE! The town’s aging infrastructure had already experienced recurring outages.
The companies said Barber Lake draws from its own on-site water supply rather than the municipal system, meaning the additional capacity funded by the initiative will serve the city. They did not disclose the facility’s water consumption in the announcement.
Barber Lake is part of Cipher’s expansion from bitcoin mining into facilities for artificial intelligence. Its initial September 2025 agreement with Fluidstack covered a 10-year lease with about $3 billion in contracted revenue and 168 megawatts of power for computing equipment. Google agreed to backstop $1.4 billion of Fluidstack’s obligations under that original arrangement.
The campus subsequently expanded to 300 megawatts of gross capacity. Cipher’s annual filing targeted delivery of the first phase by Sept. 30, 2026, and the second by Jan. 31, 2027. Those figures include power supporting the facility beyond the computing equipment itself.
Anthropic, the developer of Claude, announced a $50 billion US computing infrastructure investment with Fluidstack in November 2025, beginning with data centers in Texas and New York.
