Bitcoin miner AI pivots raise stakes as Magnificent-7 enters the chat

Cipher Mining and IREN announced two of the biggest deals yet for bitcoin miners braking into AI/HPC workloads. Cipher signed a $5.5B deal, 15-year deal with Amazon, and IREN inked a $9.7 billion, 5-year contract with Microsoft. The deals are the first contracts signed directly with a hyperscaler for this new crop of AI-intrepid miners. - link + link

OUR TAKE: Everyone saying “you’re not bullish enough” about these bitcoin miners was right.

IREN and Cipher’s latest deals feel like an inflection point for a sector that has been on a hot streak since the market’s rally after the April Liberation Day crash.

Prior to this, the TeraWulf and Cipher Mining’s contracts with Fluidstack — deals that were backstopped by Google — were the closest this cohort could get to a hyperscaler tenant.

Now, IREN and Cipher have nabbed hosting deals with two of the most powerful tech companies on the planet, and each of them have GWs more capacity in the planning phase to service other, potentially high caliber clients.

(And the icing on the cake here: Cipher, a company worth less than $1 billion seven months ago, is winning Amazon’s business where Berkshire Hathaway’s Pacific Power has lost it).

Clearly, there are golden opportunities out there for miners who know how to find, attract, and capitalize on it.

Question is, what deals are bubbling under the surface, waiting for that final stroke of ink to emerge?

There may be sign posts if you know where to look. Fidelity, for example, recently upped its stake in Riot Platforms to 8%, which announced headway on its initial 112 MW AI reboot at its 1 GW Corsicana facility.

In other quarterly updates, Hut 8 announced 1.5 GW of development across 4 data centers in Texas, Louisiana, and Illinois.

Leading public bitcoin miners have multiple GWs online and multiple more in development. The right site, at the right size, for the right team, could mean a company-defining deal with a hyperscaler just like we saw this week.

It’s open-season for MWs, and miners have been harvesting them more than any sector over the last half decade.

So long as dollars are flowing to AI infrastructure development, it’s anyone’s game to win or lose.

-CMH

Samourai Wallet Developer Sentenced in U.S. Money-Laundering Case

The Southern District of New York officially handed down a sentence of 5 years prison plus a $250,000 fine to Keonne Rodriguez, one of the lead developer of Samourai Wallet, marking the culmination of a long-running prosecution that accused the Bitcoin wallet developer of facilitating over $2 billion in illicit transactions and laundering more than $100 million via Samourai’s Whirlpool and Ricochet mixing features. William Lonergan Hill, the other lead developer, is expected to be sentenced soon as well. - link

OUR TAKE: 5 years is the maximum possible sentence. It’s looking like Keonne and William will both get the book thrown at them.

If you haven’t been following the “Free Samourai” movement among the more freedom/liberty folks in Bitcoin, this marks a near term defeat.

At risk of sounding crass – yeah, these guys definitely did stuff that was illegal and they were pretty brazen about flaunting their work.

But is that really what this case is about?

Both Keonne and William pled guilty to §1960(b)(1)(C), or operating an unlicensed money transmitter business. Go back barely 3 or 4 years and that particular worry was hanging over the heads of every crypto founder, even ones who were doing their best to play nice with the U.S. Government.

I believe the reason the Samourai devs had the book thrown at them was a crackdown on privacy, not money laundering.

If you look at the case, how it was handled, and the jurisdiction it was held in, you can clearly see that the methods and actions by the US government were designed to inflict harm on the broader privacy movement.

An example, as reported by The Rage: the court judge appeared very skeptical of claims that Samourai’s tools were built primarily with privacy for all users in mind, not privacy just for criminals.

In a clemency letter for Rodriguez, Judge Cote said “[Rodriguez] identifies his motive as protecting financial privacy. That’s fine, that’s good … but I don’t think that’s what's really at stake here… There is no acknowledgement in that letter of the criminal world for whom digital currency is a gift…”

As the ability for financial privacy continues to decline in the U.S., I hope that more builders will take up the mantle to build good, accessible, privacy tools for every day people – but the trend hasn’t been good. 

-CBS

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Fidelity Investments takes 8% stake in Riot Platforms

Investment giant Fidelity–with some $6.4 trillion assets under management as of June 2025–has disclosed an 8% stake in Texas-based bitcoin miner Riot Platforms (Nasdaq: RIOT), according to SEC filings.- link

Bitmain-affiliated Cango eyes AI pivot following 2024 splash into Bitcoin mining

The Bitmain-affiliated Cango (NYSE: CANG) is the latest Bitcoin miner to join the AI/HPC rush, announcing in an investor shareholder letter from CEO Paul Yu the company’s “expansion into energy infrastructure and HPC.” No formal announcement of site expansions, purchases or other developments for HPC were included in the letter. - link

Strive closes $160 million preferred stock offering in an upsized offering amid strong investor demand

Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) firm Strive (Nasdaq: ASST) raised some $160 million through an upsized public offering of its Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock, SATA, on Wednesday, November 6. Stive first announced its preferred share initial public offering (IPO) Monday. - link