Bitcoin miner Hut 8’s shares rose Monday after the Toronto Stock Exchange- and Nasdaq-listed firm said it had signed a second 15-year lease worth $9.8 billion for its AI data center.
Hut 8 shares peaked as high as $106 a pop before dropping to around $101. They closed Monday up over 10%.
The deal will see the Toronto-based firm’s Beacon Point campus in Texas data center cover 352 megawatts of IT capacity. The tenant using the data center’s will have its capacity doubled to 704 MW.
Hut 8 added that the campus has a base-term contract value of $19.6 billion over 15 years, rising to as much as $50.2 billion if renewal options are exercised.
Asher Genoot, CEO of Hut 8, said: “The real test of our power-first approach is what our partners are willing to commit against it. Our tenant at Beacon Point chose to double its footprint at the site, the strongest validation an asset can receive.”
Hut 8 last year signed a deal with American Data Centers Inc., a company backed by President Donald Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr., to contribute its Bitcoin mining equipment and help debut their American Bitcoin mining firm.
AI pivot
Hut 8 is one of a number of top publicly listed miners that have started directing resources to providing the infrastructure for high-powered computing.
The company in December secured a Google-backed partnership with Anthropic and Fluidstack to build up to 2.3 gigawatts of AI data center capacity in the U.S.
A number of Bitcoin miners have already gone all-in on the industry as minting the biggest digital coin by market cap becomes harder and demand for AI compute surges.
As the price Bitcoin has dipped, it has become harder for Bitcoin miners to make ends meet.
Nasdaq-listed Bitfarms last year announced that it would wind down mining operations to focus on high-performance computing.
Instead of dropping mining operations completely, a number of Bitcoin miners have instead marketed themselves as “compute” or “digital infrastructure” companies while switching between minting digital coins and providing compute for AI — depending on which is more profitable.
Top miners Terawulf, IREN, and Cipher Mining all last year signed multi-year HPC contracts with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft.
Both the crypto mining and HPC industries require huge amounts of energy and data centers — but the move isn’t always easy: AI data centres require more expertise than Bitcoin mining.