On Wednesday, Hut 8 Corp., a prominent bitcoin mining entity, revealed its commitment to a 15-year lease for the initial phase of its Beacon Point AI data center campus in Nueces County, Texas, valued at $9.8 billion. This strategic move highlights the intensified competition among infrastructure companies to meet the burgeoning demand for artificial intelligence computing power.
In early trading on Wednesday, shares of Hut 8 (HUT) soared to around $107, marking a 33% increase from Tuesday’s closing price, according to Yahoo Finance. Over the past month, the company’s share value has more than doubled, with an intra-day peak of $109.88 setting a new record for its stock.
The lease agreement encompasses 352 megawatts of IT capacity intended for use by a confidential, high-investment-grade client committed to deploying dedicated compute infrastructure for AI training and inference workloads at scale.
Initially conceived to serve Hut 8’s subsidiary, American Bitcoin—a company with ties to former President Trump—the Beacon Point site was repositioned towards AI infrastructure as the demand for power grew and customer needs expanded. Midway through its development, the facility underwent a redesign: an original data hall intended for 224 megawatts was expanded by 57% to accommodate a 352-megawatt AI factory within the same land and utility footprint, following advancements in Nvidia’s DSX reference architecture which enabled higher rack-level power densities.
The agreement increases 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 estimated at around $1.1 billion. The lease terms include a 3% annual rent escalator and three five-year renewal options that could elevate its total value to $25.1 billion.
AEP Texas has finalized an interconnection agreement for the entire 1,000-megawatt campus, with initial energization projected for the first quarter of 2027 and the delivery of the first data hall expected in the third quarter of that year. Beyond Beacon Point, Hut 8 is pursuing a larger pipeline encompassing 7,545 megawatts of energy capacity at various development stages.
This agreement marks another instance of bitcoin mining companies transitioning to capitalize on the expanding AI compute market. Major firms in the sector are entering into multi-billion-dollar data center agreements alongside their traditional mining operations, with some even reconsidering their commitment to Bitcoin amid price fluctuations and increasing mining challenges.