Hut 8 surges on $9.8 billion AI data-center lease, lifting compute sector

Bitcoin BTC$64,432.07 miner and AI infrastructure developer Hut 8 (HUT) jumped as much as 14% after announcing a $9.8 billion, 15-year lease for the second phase of its Beacon Point data center campus in Texas, helping lift shares across the sector.

The agreement, signed with the same investment-grade tenant that leased the first phase of the project, fully commercializes the 1-gigawatt campus. Hut 8 will build another 352 megawatts (MW) of AI computing capacity based on Nvidia’s data center architecture, bringing the tenant’s total contracted capacity at the site to 704 MW.

The second lease fully commercializes Beacon Point’s 1-gigawatt power capacity and raises the campus’ base contract value to $19.6 billion over the initial lease term.

Hut 8 rose to as high as $104.51 on Monday, and the announcement spilled over to peers in the high-performance compute sector. IREN (IREN) climbed 15%, Cipher Mining (CIFR) gained 11% and TeraWulf (WULF) added 6.4% in early trading. The CoinShares Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI) advanced 9.3%.

The share-price surge comes after AI infrastructure companies stumbled in recent weeks as investors questioned whether the industry’s breakneck spending on data centers would continue.

Earlier buoyant sentiment cooled after Chinese firms released open-source AI models that appeared to require less computing power than Western rivals. Before that, reports that Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META) was considering a cloud service to rent AI computing capacity also raised concerns that additional supply could weigh on data center operators.