Shares of Hut8 (HUT) soared nearly 30% on Wednesday as the company announced a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease agreement related to a large AI data center project in Texas. Hut8 also said the lease structure includes options that could increase the total contract value to approximately $25.1 billion if all renewal terms are exercised.
Hut 8 said the Beacoin Point campus was originally intended for Bitcoin mining, but was repositioned for AI infrastructure as demand for high-performance computing power accelerated.
The company’s transformation comes at a time when publicly traded Bitcoin miners are facing losses of around $19,000 per coin produced, facing increasingly difficult economic conditions and rapidly pivoting toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing infrastructure. With over $70 billion in contracts in place, some miners could earn up to 70% of their revenue from AI by the end of 2026.
Hut 8 announced that it has commercialized the first phase of its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County through a 352 megawatt (MW) IT capacity lease with a highly invested tenant. The contract supports AI training and inference workloads and is Hut 8’s second major AI data center contract.
The lease brings Hut 8’s total contracted AI data center capacity to 597 MW, with a total base contract value of approximately $16.8 billion. The company said it expects Beacon Point leases to contribute about 655 billion percent of its annual net operating income once stabilized.
Hut 8 said the new funding stream will support its AI infrastructure platform, including the development of additional capacity at Beacon Point and growth across its extensive pipeline. The campus has a secured power supply capacity of 1,000 MW, with first energization scheduled for the first quarter of 2027.
“Beacon Point underscores why we continue to be flexible across end markets, starting with power,” said CEO Asher Genuto. “By operating across multiple applications, we can take on assets that single use case developers cannot, and redirect them to higher-value commercialization paths as demand evolves.”
The project is designed around NVIDIA’s DSX reference architecture and will be developed with partners including American Electric Power, Vertiv and Jacobs, the company said. Initial deliveries of the first data hall are expected by the third quarter of 2027, it added.
