Buy Crypto Markets Spot FuturesBTC Earn Event Center Rewards Hub

The previous session was Wednesday, September 16. The Fed raised the federal funds range to 3.75%–4.00%, a 25 basis point move passed 12–0, and the first hike since 2023. The statement says inflation The previous session was Wednesday, September 16. The Fed raised the federal funds range to 3.75%–4.00%, a 25 basis point move passed 12–0, and the first hike since 2023. The statement says inflation

Pre-Market Briefing on Sept 17: Cipher +10.80% on a 3.2 GW AI Compute Slot, and the Fed Hikes 25bp

#US Stocks

2026/09/17 16:31

The previous session was Wednesday, September 16. The Fed raised the federal funds range to 3.75%–4.00%, a 25 basis point move passed 12–0, and the first hike since 2023. The statement says inflation remains elevated and that the hike is meant to return inflation to 2% more promptly. All three indexes closed lower, but the spread between them was wide: the Dow Jones Industrial fell 1.21% to 51,461.90, the S&P 500 fell 0.43% to 7,553.33, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 0.01% to 25,978.42, essentially flat. The stock in focus is Cipher (CIFR), up 10.80% to $16.72, on 3.2 GW of conditional tiering in total from the Texas grid operator, though the final list is settled only after the December audit. August housing starts and building permits land today at 12:30, the first economic data since the decision. Today's academy piece is the Thursday crypto-to-equities link: miners moving into AI, and the gap between contracts and delivery. Data in this article is based on the September 16, 2026 US close, and all times are UTC.

Market today: all three indexes fell on decision day, but the spread was wide

The three indexes all closed lower on September 16, but the spread between them is itself the disagreement. The Dow fell 1.21%, the deepest of the three; the S&P 500 fell 0.43%; the Nasdaq Composite fell 0.01% and was essentially flat. Same decision, same day, and 120 basis points between the reactions.

One homebuilder reported after the close. Lennar (LEN) posted third-quarter results: new orders fell 9% from a year earlier, homebuilding gross margin slipped from 17.5% to 15.8%, and the full-year delivery target was cut from 82,000–83,000 to 80,000–81,000 homes. The stock closed at $78.36, down 2.14%, and fell about another 2.4% after hours.

⚠️ Lennar's call is during today's session at 15:00 and has not happened yet. Yesterday's after-hours release was the numbers; how management explains those three items comes later today. That sets up a useful contrast with the 12:30 release. One is the whole industry's number, the other is a single builder explaining its own.

Yesterday's decision: after five meetings on hold, the first move was up

The federal funds range moved from 3.50%–3.75% to 3.75%–4.00%, a 25 basis point increase voted 12–0 with no dissent. It is the first hike since 2023, and the first change after five consecutive meetings on hold following the December 2025 cut.

The wording of the statement is worth noting. It says inflation remains elevated and that the hike is meant to return inflation to 2% more promptly, using the headline measure, not core CPI. In our September 16 edition we made the same point: three of the four inflation rulers sit above 3%, and the target the Fed writes down is set on PCE rather than CPI, which limits how much weight "core is already at 2.4%" can carry. Today's statement text bears that out.

⚠️ One line has to be drawn here: the hike is a fact and can be reported; how many more may follow cannot be inferred. The source cards for this edition give no dot-plot figures, so this article makes no claim about the policy path ahead.

Stock in focus, Cipher (CIFR): what moved was a grid slot, not the coin price

Cipher (CIFR) rose 10.80% to $16.72, adding $670M of market value in one session to reach $6.84B. Volume ran 62.69 million shares, 2.16x the average. The company's full name is Cipher Digital, renamed from Cipher Mining in February this year.

The money side: the volume belongs to today, but the position does not. The price sits only around the 30% mark of its 52-week range. Those two facts do not conflict, and neither replaces the other.

The business side: the Texas grid operator granted the company 3.2 GW of conditional tiering in total, split into 1.1 GW of base load (including 1 GW at the Colchis site) plus 2.1 GW of study load. Social material adds that of a 3.4 GW Texas pipeline, 3.2 GW received conditional tiering.

⚠️ Three qualifiers travel with that number:

Conditional tiering is not energized capacity, and it is not final. The final list is settled only after the December audit, and the operator began sending data validation requests on September 9.
Base load and study load are reviewed on different terms and should not be merged into one figure.
Spot bitcoin ETFs barely moved the same day. The driver was the grid slot, not bitcoin.

The five-dimension score is the most extreme we have published: trend position 30, peer strength 100, peer rank 100, sector valuation 76, and volatility control 0. A zero there is not "low", it is the far end of the scale, and it matches a beta of 3.17: when the market moves 1%, this moves about 3.2%.

The five corners are sharply uneven, not a balanced shape. The two perfect scores describe the day, that it was the strongest in its group. Trend position at 30 describes the year, that it still sits in the lower part of the range. For comparison, the weakest score in our two previous editions was 40 and then 59. Today it is 0.

The supporting name, GE Vernova (GEV), rose 4.79% to $925.09. It sells generating equipment and grid gear, and sits on the same power chain as the compute sites: one side bids for slots, the other sells the equipment. Its chief executive told a broker conference that the backlog could reach $200B by early 2027, against $176B at quarter-end. ⚠️ The $200B is what the chief executive said, not a realized figure, and the attribution cannot be dropped.

Peer comparison: the whole group rose, across a 12.58 point spread

Across six bitcoin mining and AI compute names grouped manually by business nature, five rose and one fell on September 16: Cipher (CIFR) +10.80%, TeraWulf (WULF) +6.21%, Core Scientific (CORZ) +5.24%, Applied Digital (APLD) +4.14%, Riot Platforms (RIOT) +3.30%, and MARA Holdings (MARA) −1.78%. The ends are 12.58 points apart, and Cipher finished 4.59 points clear of second.

⚠️ This day was neither a counter-move nor a sector-wide lift. The whole group rose, but by very different amounts. The market priced each name on its own progress rather than as one block. Power allocations, contract sizes and energization dates were never the same, so this list has to be read name by name rather than as one sector headline.

One-minute concept: when you see "awarded X GW of grid capacity", ask three things

A data centre needs power, so it first has to queue for an allocation with the grid operator. That waiting list is the interconnection queue. The same GW figure means very different things once all three questions are asked.

1. How many GW. Cipher received 3.2 GW of conditional tiering in total, out of a 3.4 GW Texas pipeline.

2. Which tier. Base load is reviewed against continuous full-load consumption; study load still needs the transmission lines checked again. So 1.1 GW and 2.1 GW are not two halves of one thing, they are two allocations on different terms. ⚠️ Merging them into one figure counts the least certain tier as certain.

3. When it becomes final. Conditional tiering only means the project stays on the list and moves into the next round of system studies. The final list is settled only after the December audit.

There is also a convention for turning GW into money: the industry puts AI hosting at about $1.5M per MW a year and bitcoin mining at about $0.5M per MW a year. The same 1 GW earns three times as much depending on what it is used for. ⚠️ That is an industry yardstick, not any company's reported revenue, and it should not be applied to a specific name to derive a sales figure.

What to watch today: August housing starts, where rates transmit fastest

August housing starts and building permits land today at 12:30, alongside jobless claims and the Philadelphia Fed manufacturing index. This is the first economic data since yesterday's decision, and it lands exactly where rates transmit fastest.

Housing follows a fixed order: mortgage rates move first, then building permits, and only then starts and residential investment. Today's release is the first progress report the market gets on that transmission after the policy turn.

The core series is single-family housing starts (thousand units, SAAR): April 914, May 889, June 897, July 808.

→ April through June all sat in a narrow 889 to 914 band, then July dropped to 808 in one step, down 9.9% on the month and 15.7% on the year.

→ Why single-family rather than total starts: multifamily is about a third of total permits and swings 10% to 20% in a single month; single-family is the part mortgage rates act on directly, and the bulk of builder revenue.

→ SAAR scales a seasonally adjusted month up to an annual pace, so 89 thousand units off one month means a full year of construction shrinking.

→ August prints today, with the market looking for roughly 1.31 million total starts.

Drill-down: permits issued, ground not broken

Six figures from July 2026 (thousand units, SAAR): building permits total 1,443, housing starts total 1,239; permits single-family 894, starts single-family 808; permits multifamily 490, starts multifamily 421.

→ Permits at 1,443 thousand are tickets for future work; starts at 1,239 thousand are what actually broke ground that month. The gap is 204 thousand units.

→ The directions are clearer still: permits rose 5.0% on the month while starts fell 12.4%.

→ Permits normally lead starts by three to six months, so a divergence like this reads one way: builders will take the ticket, but they will not put the money in.

→ Single-family shows it most plainly: 894 in permits against only 808 in starts.

⚠️ Two measurement notes: permits and starts are not the same stage of the same houses and should not be treated as two figures for one thing; and the totals include structures outside the single-family and multifamily rows, so those two rows do not sum to the total.

How to read tonight's print: first, whether single-family starts get back above 850 thousand. August tests whether July's 808 was a one-off distortion. Second, whether the gap between permits and starts narrows; a gap that keeps widening means builders are stockpiling approvals rather than adding capacity.

Academy: the crypto-to-equities link, and the gap between contracts and delivery

The rigs still run, but the money changed shape. Four US-listed miners signed AI leases this year, and their second-quarter revenue mixes are not comparable:

Four names, four models. Mining it yourself is Riot Platforms (RIOT), with $174.2M of Q2 revenue and mining still at 65%. Renting the compute out is Cipher (CIFR), 168 MW signed to Fluidstack over 10 years for about $3B. Running your own GPUs is IREN Limited (IREN), 200 MW to Microsoft with the first 50 MW delivered in August. Leasing the whole hall is TeraWulf (WULF), 401 MW over 20 years with rent already 71% of revenue.

RIOT: of $174.2M in Q2 revenue, $113.7M came from mining bitcoin. In the same quarter it sold 4,300 bitcoin to support operations and data centre expansion. Its own 191 MW twenty-year lease is not fully delivered until June 2028.
CIFR: the 168 MW ten-year contract is taken by Fluidstack, with Google backstopping $1.4B of it in exchange for roughly 5.4% of the equity; the first capacity was delivered in August, two months ahead of plan.
IREN: not a landlord. It buys GPUs and sells cloud compute. The 200 MW Microsoft agreement runs in four phases, and the first 50 MW came online in August.
WULF: furthest along. Of $44.8M in Q2 revenue, $31.9M was AI rent (71%), leaving mining at 29%, and 102 MW is energized and earning. But its largest lease, 401 MW over 20 years worth about $19B, does not start delivering power until the second half of 2027 and is full only in early 2028.

Drawdown from the 52-week high: the highest mining share sits closest

The five figures (%): Riot Platforms (RIOT) 32.9, Bitcoin (BTC) 39.5, Cipher (CIFR) 44.5, IREN Limited (IREN) 44.6, TeraWulf (WULF) 48.4. The calculation is (52-week high − latest close) ÷ 52-week high.

→ RIOT, with the highest mining share, sits closest to its high; WULF, with the highest rent share, sits furthest from it.

→ The bigger the lease signed, the more data halls, substations and equipment have to be funded first.

⚠️ Three measurement notes: (1) this is neither a return nor a valuation. It measures only how far a price sits below its own high within a year; (2) each of those highs occurred on a different date; (3) it is a different metric from the one-year price band (a multiple) used in our September 16 edition and the 52-week range position (a percentage) used on September 15. The three should never be quoted across editions.

Company Profile: TeraWulf (WULF)

It used to mine with hydropower beside a lake in New York State, and now it leases the whole hall out. Of $44.8M in Q2 revenue, $31.9M was AI rent, and 102 MW is energized and earning.
The largest lease has not started paying. 401 MW, 20 years, about $19B, and it does not start delivering power until the second half of 2027, reaching full load only in early 2028.

One-minute concept: why a company can sign about $19B and still trade well below its high

The headline value covers the whole term. That roughly $19B spans 20 years, which is under $1B a year, about $950M.
Revenue waits for power. Halls get built, substations get connected, liquid cooling gets installed. WULF's 401 MW starts delivering in the second half of 2027; RIOT's 191 MW is not fully delivered until June 2028.
The build money goes out first. RIOT sold 4,300 bitcoin in Q2 to support operations and its AI data centre expansion.

The transferable test: when you see "signed a multi-billion dollar deal", ask three things first: who pays, which year the payments start, and where the money to build the hall comes from. Only when all three have answers does the contract mean much.

Frequently asked questions

Q: The Fed hiked. How many more hikes are coming?

A: The source material for this edition provides only this decision's outcome (range 3.75%–4.00%, a 25 basis point move, voted 12–0) and the statement's wording (inflation remains elevated). It gives no dot-plot figures, so this article makes no claim about the policy path ahead.

Q: Cipher received 3.2 GW. Can it start drawing that power now?

A: No. This is conditional tiering, which is not energized capacity and is not final. The final list is settled only after the December audit, and the operator began sending data validation requests on September 9. The 3.2 GW also splits into 1.1 GW of base load and 2.1 GW of study load, two tiers reviewed on different terms that should not be read as one number.

Q: Cipher rose 10.80%. Was that because bitcoin rose?

A: Spot bitcoin ETFs barely moved the same day. The six names in the group ranged from +10.80% to −1.78%, so what rose was each company's own power progress rather than one shared coin-price headline.

Q: Permits exceed starts by 204 thousand units. Does that mean 204 thousand homes cannot be built?

A: It cannot be read that way. Permits and starts are not the same stage of the same houses, and permits normally lead starts by three to six months, so the two were never going to match. What the gap reads is direction: permits rose 5.0% on the month while starts fell 12.4%, meaning builders will take the ticket but will not put the money in.

Q: WULF signed a lease worth about $19B. Why is that not simply good news?

A: This article makes no such judgement. It states three facts: the roughly $19B is a 20-year total, about $950M a year; the 401 MW does not start delivering power until the second half of 2027; and 102 MW is energized and earning. What the size of a contract implies for a share price is for the reader to judge.

Disclaimer: This article is compiled and written by the MEXC RealStocks team. The data in this article is based on the closing of the US stock market on September 16, 2026. The content is a compilation of public market information, and individual stocks are publicly discussed targets, which do not represent the recommendation or opinion of MEXC and do not constitute any investment advice. More US stock content: @MEXC | @Alpha_MEXC | @MEXC_Research

Market Opportunity

Notcoin Price(NOT)

----

USD

Notcoin (NOT) Live Price Chart

The articles shared on this page are sourced from public platforms and are provided for reference only. They do not represent the position or views of MEXC. All rights belong to MEXC. If you believe any content infringes upon the rights of a third party, please contact [email protected] for prompt removal. MEXC does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of any content and is not responsible for any actions taken based on the information provided. The content does not constitute financial, legal, or other professional advice, nor should it be interpreted as a recommendation or endorsement by MEXC. For expert insights and in-depth analysis, visit MEXC Learn.