Hut 8 sees shares rise after signing $9.8 billion data center lease in Texas

Hut 8 signed another 15-year lease worth $9.8 billion on Monday to fill the remaining capacity at its 1-gigawatt Beacon Point data center campus in Texas, with the company’s shares rising by about 5% in premarket trading as a result.

The lease is expected to cover 352 megawatts of capacity. The megawatt has become a currency of the AI expansion because training and running large models consume enormous amounts of power, and with the new commitment, Beacon Point’s full gigawatt of capacity is now under contract.

Hut 8 expands with returning customers

Hut 8 said the lease’s counterparty is a previous investment-grade customer that has now doubled its capacity at the site to 704 MW. The company described all of its contracted capacity as leased to investment-grade counterparties.

The returning customer expanded due to a hardware overhaul. Hut 8 said it rebuilt the campus’s first data hall around Nvidia’s (NVDA) architecture and managed to squeeze out a 57% gain in capacity from the same land and same power connection. This increase in efficiency has allowed the tenant to upscale without any new construction at the center.

Beacon Point’s campus now represents $19.6 billion in contracted value, according to the company, a figure that could hit as high as $50.2 billion if renewal options are exercised. Hut 8’s general AI portfolio and contracted capacity stand at 949 MW, supported by 1,330 MW of power capacity, with an aggregate base value of $26.6 billion. The company also boasts an average annual net operating income above $1.75 billion.

Long term delivery plans amid Hut 8 evolution

The first data hall in the campus’s second phase is expected to come online in the second quarter of 2028, according to Hut 8.

The deal marks another step in the company’s move away from its origins. Hut 8 started as a Bitcoin miner, but has spent recent months redirecting the power assets and data center operations built during the crypto boom toward AI interests instead.

A number of former Bitcoin miners have also invested in the same pivot due to the increase in demand for compute infrastructure since the arrival of generative AI.

Tech companies have committed large amounts to data centers packed with advanced chips, and this competition has widened past the chips themselves. Power availability, transmission access, and development-ready sites are now massively important in deciding who can build in this raging AI storm the world has been caught in.

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