Services either side
Colorado City has a grocery, fuel and a county hospital; the full Walmart run is Sweetwater or Big Spring, both on the interstate.
The job
Barber Lake, on the clock
Also known as Cipher Mining Barber Lake · Fluidstack Colorado City · Mitchell County data center
Cipher signed Fluidstack for Barber Lake in late 2025—about $3 billion over the initial term, up to $7 billion with extensions—with Google backstopping $1.4 billion of the lease and taking warrants in Cipher. The lease was then amended to add a 39 MW Phase II, taking Fluidstack's critical IT entitlement from 168 MW to 207 MW on 300 MW of gross power. In February 2026 the company renamed itself Cipher Digital to say out loud that it is now a data center developer, not a bitcoin miner.
Phase I is scheduled for delivery in September 2026 and Phase II in January 2027. Cipher has raised $2 billion in notes for its Texas expansion, so Barber Lake is one campus in a growing portfolio—Black Pearl at Wink for AWS and a 900 MW site option outside San Antonio are the others.
Colorado City is a Mitchell County town of about 4,000 on I-20, with Big Spring thirty-five miles west and Sweetwater—IREN's 2 GW build—twenty-eight miles east. Rooms are scarce and split between two jobs. We're placing furnished weekly rooms in Colorado City and Loraine, and along I-20 toward Sweetwater.
