Well like the others I would prefer to stay away from cloud mining The best-known cloud mining back a year ago like Hashnest, Hashflare, and Genesis is dead.
Tell your friend if your friend has a lot capital it better to mine in home or just buy bitcoin.
Recently I registered on a new Cloud mining platform called Bitfufu and Bitdeer Antminer is also backed the company but after I registered and want to try it out the site directly as KYC
So I'm not gonna test it.
Did you read an official announcement somewhere from Antminer that they are backing the company or are in any way associated with it? If not, I doubt it is not a real partnership. Though I can be wrong, some websites or services use fake partnerships and sponsorships only to gain more investors and users to trust them for their services.
I'm not blaming the websites, but as we all know that cloud mining platforms are about 99% scams and they can never be trusted with money, so it is better to see all the possible ways they can use to lure more users.