Hut 8 Corp. 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, sending its stock up roughly 30% and cementing the former Bitcoin miner's pivot into the highest tier of hyperscale AI infrastructure providers. The deal, announced on May 6, covers 352 megawatts of IT capacity and could rise to as much as $25.1 billion if renewal options are exercised.
A 15-year, take-or-pay anchor
The contract is structured on a take-or-pay, triple-net basis with no termination for convenience, and includes annual rent escalators, according to Hut 8 chief executive Asher Genoot. The tenant — described only as a high-investment-grade company — has not been publicly identified, but Hut 8 says the capacity will be used for AI training and inference workloads. Annual revenue from the first phase is expected to reach roughly $655 million once it is fully operational.
With the lease, Hut 8's contracted AI data center capacity climbs to 597 MW and the total contracted value across its portfolio rises to about $16.8 billion. That moves the company from a mid-cap pivot story into the same conversation as CoreWeave, Crusoe and Applied Digital — names that have used long-duration leases to hyperscalers as the foundation for multi-billion-dollar financings.
A gigawatt campus, designed around Nvidia
Beacon Point is being developed as a 1 gigawatt campus, of which the 352 MW announced this week represents only the first phase. Hut 8 says the facility is being designed using Nvidia's latest data center reference systems and is being built with American Electric Power on power delivery, Vertiv on thermal and power infrastructure, and Jacobs as engineering partner. Power is expected to be connected to the site in early 2027, with the first building scheduled for completion later that year.
The scale and structure echo the wave of multi-gigawatt deals struck by hyperscalers and labs over the past six months, including Anthropic's reported $200 billion commitment to Google Cloud and OpenAI's roughly 26 GW of compute supply agreements with Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom and Oracle. What is different about the Hut 8 deal is who is on the other side of it: a publicly traded company that started life as a crypto miner is now, in effect, operating as a landlord to the AI build-out.
Why this matters
For the broader market, the lease is another data point in a pattern that has been hard to ignore. AI compute demand is being underwritten not just through capex on Nvidia GPUs but through extremely long-duration real estate-style contracts, with credit terms that look closer to industrial leases than cloud agreements. Take-or-pay contracts of this size shift the financing math for data center developers, allowing them to raise debt against guaranteed cash flows rather than purely speculative builds.
It also reinforces how power, not silicon, is increasingly the binding constraint. A 352 MW commitment in Texas — secured through American Electric Power — is a rare commodity in 2026, and one of the reasons developers with shovel-ready sites near major transmission corridors have become acquisition targets. With Beacon Point's full 1 GW envelope still to be commercialized, expect competitors and would-be tenants to pay close attention to who Hut 8's first anchor turns out to be when, or if, the tenant is eventually unmasked.
— Michael Ouroumis
