Yahoo Financeยท2025-11-08 11:00Group 1: Major Deals in Bitcoin Mining - Cipher Mining signed a 15-year lease agreement worth $5.5 billion with Amazon Web Services for 300 megawatts at its Bear Lake facility, set to launch in July 2026, highlighting the growing demand for AI workloads [3][4] - IREN entered into a five-year, $9.7 billion cloud compute agreement with Microsoft for 200 megawatts at its Childress, Texas site, alongside a $5.8 billion procurement deal with Dell for hardware [5][6] Group 2: Market Reactions and Stock Performance - Despite the significant deals, Cipher's stock fell over 10% amid a broader tech-sector sell-off, with the deal value exceeding its $8 billion market cap, indicating investor enthusiasm for AI-related mining ventures [4] - IREN's shares also dropped approximately 10% on the same day, although analysts described the Microsoft agreement as a "watershed moment" for Bitcoin miners transitioning towards AI and high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure [5][6] Group 3: Industry Trends and Future Prospects - The partnerships signify a shift in the Bitcoin mining industry towards providing power and infrastructure for AI tenants, while GPU management is left to specialized partners, validating the "powershell" model [6] - IREN's 20,000-unit Neo Cloud cluster may serve as a testing ground for independent AI compute capabilities, although uncertainties remain regarding its GPU strategy [6]