Hut 8 Shares Hit All-Time High Price as Bitcoin Miner Signs $9.8 Billion AI Data Center Lease

In brief Hut 8 signed a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for 352 MW of AI data center capacity at its Beacon Point campus in Texas. The deal is the second hyperscale AI campus lease under Hut 8's "power-first" development model. The campus, originally planned for Bitcoin mining, is built to Nvidia's DSX architecture. Bitcoin mining firm Hut 8 Corp. announced Wednesday that it has signed a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for the first phase of its Beacon Point AI data center campus in Nueces County, Texas—a deal that underscores the accelerating race among infrastructure companies to capitalize on surging demand for AI computing power. Shares in the firm (HUT) are flying high in early Wednesday trading, recently changing hands around $107—a 33% rise from Tuesday’s closing price, per Yahoo Finance . Hut 8’s share price has more than doubled in the last month alone, with Wednesday’s early peak of $109.88 representing an all-time high for the stock. The agreement covers 352 megawatts of IT capacity with a tenant described only as a confidential, high-investment-grade company that plans to deploy dedicated compute infrastructure to support AI training and inference workloads at hyperscale. Rather than building for a predetermined customer, the company originally underwrote the Beacon Point site to serve its subsidiary, the Trump-backed American Bitcoin , before repositioning the campus toward AI infrastructure as power demand accelerated and customer requirements broadened.  The company also redesigned the facility mid-development: An initial data hall scoped for 224 megawatts was enlarged to support a 352-megawatt AI factory—a 57% increase—within the same land and utility footprint, after Nvidia's DSX reference architecture advanced toward commercial deployment with materially higher rack-level power densities. The deal brings Hut 8's total contracted AI data center capacity to 597 megawatts, with an aggregate base-term contract value of approximately $16.8 billion and average annual net operating income of approximately $1.1 billion. The lease includes a 3% annual rent escalator and three five-year renewal options that could push its total value to $25.1 billion. AEP Texas has executed an interconnection agreement for the full 1,000-megawatt campus, with initial energization expected in the first quarter of 2027 and first data hall delivery anticipated in the third quarter of that year. Beyond Beacon Point, Hut 8 is pursuing a broader pipeline spanning 7,545 megawatts of energy capacity under various stages of diligence and development. Hut 8’s deal extends a recent streak of Bitcoin mining firms pivoting to embrace the growing AI compute opportunity, with major companies in the space signing multi-billion-dollar data center deals alongside their mining operations—and some even abandoning their Bitcoin roots amid price volatility and rising mining difficulty. Daily Debrief Newsletter Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more. Your Email Get it! Get it!