Shares of Hut 8 ( HUT ) surged nearly 30% on Wednesday as the company announced a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease tied to a large-scale AI data center project in Texas. Hut 8 also said the lease structure includes options that could increase the total contract value to about $25.1 billion if all renewal terms are exercised.
The Beacoin Point campus was originally intended for bitcoin mining, but was repositioned for AI infrastructure as demand for high-performance computing capacity accelerated, Hut 8 said.
The company’s pivot comes at a time when publicly traded bitcoin miners are facing increasingly challenging finances as they face losses of approximately $19,000 per miner. produced coin and is rapidly turning towards artificial intelligence and high-performance computing infrastructure. More than $70 billion in contracts have been signed, and some miners could derive up to 70% of their revenue from AI by the end of 2026
Hut 8 said it has commercialized the first phase of its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County through a 352-megawatt (MW) IT capacity lease with a high-investment tenant. The deal supports AI training and inference workloads and marks Hut 8’s second major AI data center deal.
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 the Beacon Point lease to contribute about $655 billion in 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 wider pipeline. The campus has secured 1,000 MW supply capacity, with initial energy supply expected in the 1st quarter of 2027.
“Beacon Point underscores why we start with strength and maintain flexibility across end markets,” said CEO Asher Genoot. “Operating across multiple applications lets us underwrite assets that one-off developers can’t, then redirect them toward higher-value commercialization pathways as demand evolves.”
The company said the project is designed for NVIDIA’s DSX reference architecture and will be developed with partners including American Electric Power, Vertiv and Jacobs. Initial delivery of the first data hall is expected in Q3 2027, it added.
