Hut 8 inks $9.8B, 15-year AI lease for 352MW

Hut 8 announced a $9.8 billion, 15-year triple-net lease for 352 megawatts of rack-level IT capacity at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas. The tenant was described as an unnamed, high investment-grade company that will deploy hardware for AI training and inference. Hut 8’s shares rose about 30% in pre-market trading after the announcement.

The Beacon Point campus is designed as a gigawatt-scale site with 1,000 MW of utility capacity under an interconnection agreement with AEP Texas. Hut 8 reported the first phase of the project, representing roughly 500 MW of utility capacity to support the 352 MW IT load, is expected to begin energization in the first quarter of 2027, with initial data hall delivery targeted for the third quarter of 2027. Once stabilized, the lease is projected to contribute approximately $655 million in average annual net operating income.

Including three optional five-year renewal terms, the contract’s potential value could increase to about $25.1 billion. Beacon Point is Hut 8’s second major AI commercialization after the River Bend project, a 245 MW contract with Fluidstack. Combined, Beacon Point and River Bend account for 597 MW of contracted IT capacity and roughly $16.8 billion in aggregate base-term contract value, the company reported.

Beacon Point was originally underwritten to support Hut 8’s affiliated bitcoin mining venture, American Bitcoin Corp., before the site was redirected for AI infrastructure. The company redesigned the first building after NVIDIA’s evolving DSX AI factory reference architecture raised rack-level power density requirements. That redesign increased the planned IT capacity for the first building from 224 MW to 352 MW without expanding the land or utility footprint.

The structure of the Beacon Point agreement follows a growing pattern of long-duration, infrastructure-style leases backed by investment-grade counterparties for AI projects. Hut 8 indicated it plans to finance the project through asset-level financing structures intended to lower capital costs and limit pressure on corporate leverage. The company previously closed a $3.25 billion bond offering to fund the River Bend campus tied to its 15-year lease with Fluidstack.

The tenant for Beacon Point was not disclosed in the announcement. Hut 8 characterized the counterparty as having high investment-grade credit and deploying high-density GPU infrastructure for AI training and inference workloads.