Hut 8 Inks $9.8B 15-Year Lease for Texas AI Data Center, Shares Hit Record
Hut 8 Corp., a bitcoin mining company, said Wednesday it has signed a 15-year lease valued at $9.8 billion for the first phase of its Beacon Point AI data center campus in Nueces County, Texas, highlighting intensifying competition among infrastructure providers as demand for AI compute accelerates.
Shares of Hut 8 (HUT) jumped in early trading Wednesday and were recently around $107, up 33% from Tuesday's close. The stock touched $109.88 earlier in the session, a new all-time high, after more than doubling over the past month.
The lease covers 352 megawatts of IT capacity. The tenant is a confidential, high-investment-grade company that plans to deploy dedicated computing infrastructure for large-scale AI training and inference.
Hut 8 said it originally began building the Beacon Point site without a pre-committed customer, initially intended to serve its subsidiary, before the campus was repositioned as AI infrastructure as electricity and customer demand strengthened.
During development, the company expanded the planned data hall from 224 MW to 352 MW, a 57% increase within the same land and utility footprint. Hut 8 attributed the change to improvements in rack-level power density tied to NVIDIA's DSX reference architecture and its move toward commercial deployment.
With the deal, Hut 8's total contracted AI data center capacity rises to 597 MW, with an underlying contract value of about $16.8 billion and average annual net operating income of roughly $1.1 billion. The lease includes a 3% annual rent escalator and three five-year renewal options that could lift total value to $25.1 billion.
AEP Texas has signed an interconnection agreement covering the full 1,000-MW campus. Power is expected to begin flowing in the first quarter of 2027, with the first data center targeted for delivery in the third quarter of 2027.
Beyond Beacon Point, Hut 8 said it is progressing a larger project with total installed capacity of 7,545 MW, currently in various stages of due diligence and development.
Across the sector, bitcoin miners are increasingly pivoting toward AI computing, with major operators signing multibillion-dollar data center agreements. Some firms have exited bitcoin mining entirely amid price volatility and rising mining difficulty.
