Hut 8 inks $9.8B, 15-year lease for Texas AI campus

Hut 8 Corp. announced a 15-year lease worth $9.8 billion for 352 megawatts of AI data center capacity at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas. The tenant was not named and is described by the company as a confidential, high-investment-grade firm planning hyperscale AI training and inference deployments.

The lease includes a 3% annual rent escalator and three five-year renewal options. If the tenant exercises all renewals, Hut 8 says the contract value could reach $25.1 billion over time. The agreement covers the first phase of the Beacon Point campus and is the company’s second hyperscale AI campus lease under its “power-first” development model.

Shares in Hut 8 jumped in early trading after the announcement, trading around $107-about a 33% increase from the prior day-and reaching an intraday peak near $109.88, an all-time high. The stock has more than doubled over the past month.

Beacon Point was originally underwritten to serve Hut 8’s subsidiary, American Bitcoin, but the project was repositioned for AI as customer power needs increased. Midway through development, an initial data hall scoped at 224 MW was expanded to 352 MW within the same land and utility footprint after Nvidia’s DSX reference architecture advanced and raised rack-level power densities.

AEP Texas has executed an interconnection agreement for the full 1,000-megawatt campus. Hut 8 expects initial energization in the first quarter of 2027 and delivery of the first data hall in the third quarter of 2027.

Including the new lease, Hut 8’s contracted AI data center capacity totals 597 megawatts, with an aggregate base-term contract value of about $16.8 billion. The company estimates average annual net operating income from its AI contracts at roughly $1.1 billion. Beyond Beacon Point, Hut 8 is advancing a pipeline totaling 7,545 megawatts of energy capacity at various stages of diligence and development.

The transaction continues a pattern of firms with Bitcoin-mining roots signing large data center agreements and adapting mining projects to support higher-density AI compute workloads.