SerpApi.Org
The shares of Hut 8 (Nasdaq: HUT), a Bitcoin miner that has been expanding into artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, jumped as much as 14% on July 20 after the firm signed a $9.8 billion lease that fully commercializes its massive Texas data center campus.
The 15-year deal covers the second phase of Hut 8's Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas, and was signed with the same investment-grade tenant that leased the first phase.
Hut 8 will build another 352 MW of AI computing capacity, based on Nvidia's data center design, bringing the tenant's total contracted capacity at the site to 704 MW.
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A campus now fully booked
With this second lease, Beacon Point's entire 1-gigawatt power capacity is now under contract, pushing the campus's total base contract value to $19.6 billion over the initial lease term. If all renewal options are exercised, that figure could eventually climb to $50.2 billion.
Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot framed the tenant's decision to double its footprint as validation of the company's approach.
"The real test of our power-first approach is what our partners are willing to commit against it," Genoot said. "We took this greenfield site from first lease to full commercialization in just months."
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Ripple effects across the sector
Hut 8 shares climbed as high as $104.51 Monday, and the rally spread to other companies in the compute sector.
IREN gained 15%, Cipher Mining rose 11%, and TeraWulf added 6.4% in early trading. The CoinShares Bitcoin Miners ETF advanced 9.3%.
HUT was trading at $101.07 at press time, up 10.52% over the past 24 hours.
The rally followed a rough stretch for AI infrastructure stocks, which had been under pressure over concerns about whether heavy spending on data centers could continue.
Sentiment cooled further after Chinese firms released open-source AI models that appeared to need less computing power than their Western counterparts, and after reports that Meta was exploring renting out its own AI computing capacity, raising fears of oversupply.
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