By Gowri Gurumurthy | Updated on Jun 08, 2026 at 10:25 PM
Cipher Digital Inc. raised $810 million from a junk-bond sale to help fund a data center tied to Amazon.com Inc., adding to a wave of riskier debt financing backing the artificial intelligence infrastructure boom.
Proceeds will be used to finance the remaining cost of Cipher’s Stingray Facility, a computing data center in West Texas that will be leased to Amazon under a 15-year contract, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
The debt was priced at 99.75 cents on the dollar to yield 6.059%, compared with initial price talk of about 6.25%, the person said, asking not to be identified disclosing private information.
It underscores how junk-debt markets are helping finance AI infrastructure tied to hyperscalers such as Amazon and Alphabet Inc. By signing long-term leases on data centers developed by smaller firms, the tech giants have helped unlock billions of dollars of financing for new projects.
Cipher Digital — formerly known as Cipher Mining due to its origin as a cryptocurrency miner — last tapped the market in February, raising $2 billion to fund its Black Pearl Compute data center in Texas.
Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Wells Fargo & Co., Banco Santander SA and SMBC Nikko Securities Inc. ran Cipher’s new offering.
The transaction includes a provision that ties the amount of debt Cipher will pay back each year to the amount of cash generated by the project after its completion. By contrast, most high-yield data-center financings require borrowers to repay a fixed amount of principal over the life of the bond.
The deal comes on the same day Amazon is selling C$14 billion ($10 billion) of investment-grade bonds in Canadian dollars — the largest corporate bond offering on record in the currency.