HIVE wins $220M GPU cloud deal with Bell, Cohere

HIVE Digital Technologies’ BUZZ High Performance Computing unit signed a $220 million, three-year GPU cloud contract with Bell Canada and Cohere to install 2,304 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs at Bell’s Merritt, British Columbia data centre. The equipment is scheduled to begin operating between late 2026 and early 2027. Cohere will use the capacity to run services for Canadian government and enterprise customers.

HIVE projects the agreement will add about $70 million in annual recurring revenue once the deployment is live. Combined with roughly $35 million from existing GPU operations, HIVE’s contracted high-performance computing revenue now exceeds $100 million. HIVE’s shares rose more than 7% on the Toronto Stock Exchange after the announcement.

The contract aligns with Canada’s Sovereign AI Compute Strategy. Ottawa has committed more than $2 billion to domestic compute and provided $240 million to Cohere. Bell and Cohere began a commercial partnership in July 2025; the new contract supplies the physical compute layer for that arrangement.

HIVE reported $278.3 million in Bitcoin mining revenue in its most recent quarter. The company began shifting capacity and capital toward GPU compute in 2022, redirecting GPUs from crypto workloads, signing a deal with Dell for new GPUs in November, and raising $115 million through a convertible note offering in April to fund hardware purchases.

HIVE is also planning a 320-megawatt AI data centre in the Greater Toronto Area designed to house more than 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs at full build-out. The company expects the GTA facility could generate about $360 million in annual recurring revenue at full operation and has set a target of $660 million in annualized high-performance computing revenue by the end of 2028.

Cohere is a Toronto-based company that builds large language models for enterprise and government use. It recently announced a merger with Germany’s Aleph Alpha that values the combined business at roughly $20 billion.

Frank Holmes, executive chairman of HIVE Digital Technologies, called the Bell-Cohere partnership ‘a defining moment’ and added that BUZZ HPC will be ‘the GPU factory layer that transforms Canada’s AI ambitions from political promises into productive national assets.’

Several former cryptocurrency miners have repurposed capacity for AI workloads. Market demand for multi-year, locked-in AI compute contracts differs from crypto mining, where rewards vary with asset prices and network competition.