Cipher Mining Expands National Footprint with Major Ohio Data Center Land Acquisition

Cipher Mining Acquires Land for 200MW Data Center Campus in Ohio January 14, 2026 Cipher Mining, a company transitioning from cryptocurrency mining to high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure development, has secured a strategic land parcel in Ohio, marking its first major expansion outside its Texas stronghold. This move underscores the intensifying competition for scalable, well-connected data center sites to support the explosive growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing workloads across the United States. The company announced the acquisition of a 195-acre site, named "Ulysses," in late December. The property has the potential to support a data center campus with up to 200 megawatts (MW) of critical IT capacity. Cipher has already secured power capacity from the local utility, AEP Ohio, and stated that the site is on track to be energized and operational by the fourth quarter of 2027. The company highlighted the location's suitability for HPC, citing its significant acreage, established energization timeline, availability of diverse fiber optic network paths, and proximity to a major metropolitan area. This acquisition significantly boosts Cipher's development pipeline. With the addition of the Ohio site, the company's total planned capacity now reaches 3.4 gigawatts (GW) spread across eight locations. Cipher, which was spun off from Bitcoin mining hardware firm Bitfury in 2021, is pivoting its business model to provide large-scale HPC and AI hosting services for major cloud providers. Its existing operational portfolio in Texas includes sites such as a 200MW facility in Odessa and the 150MW Black Pearl site. The expansion into Ohio follows Cipher's success in securing anchor tenant agreements for its HPC developments. The company has signed multi-hundred-megawatt hosting deals with industry giants, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Fluidstack in an agreement backed by Google Cloud, validating its strategic shift and the demand for its planned infrastructure. The development signals a broader trend of data center growth in the Midwest, a region attracting investment due to available land, power capacity, and strategic connectivity. Cipher's entry into Ohio positions it to capitalize on this demand while diversifying its geographic risk and tapping into a new pool of potential customers and energy partnerships. Source: datacenterdynamics