Shares of bitcoin mining company Hut 8 rose on Monday after the Toronto and Nasdaq-listed company said it had signed a second 15-year lease.
Hut 8 shares peaked at $106 before falling to around $101. They closed Monday up more than 10%.
The deal will see the company’s Toronto-based Beacon Point campus cover Texas 352
Hut 8 added that the base contract for the campus is worth $19.6 billion over 15 years, rising to up to $50.2 billion if renewal options are exercised.
“The true test of our strength-first approach is what our partners are willing to commit to,” said Asher Guinot, CEO of Hut 8. “Our tenant at Beacon Point has chosen to double its footprint on site, which is the strongest validation an asset can have.”
Hut 8 last year signed a deal with American Data Centers Inc., a company backed by President Donald Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr., to contribute bitcoin mining equipment and help launch the American bitcoin mining company.
Pivotal artificial intelligence
Hut 8 is one of a number of top publicly listed mining companies that have begun directing resources to providing high-powered computing infrastructure.
company in December Believer Google-backed partnership with Anthropic and Fluidstack to build up to 2.3 GW of AI data center capacity in the US
A number of Bitcoin miners are already involved in the industry, as minting the largest digital currency by market cap becomes more difficult, as demand for artificial intelligence computing increases.
As the price of Bitcoin declines, it becomes more difficult for Bitcoin miners to make ends meet.
Nasdaq-listed Bitfarms announced last year that it would end its mining operations to focus on high-performance computing.
Rather than abandoning mining operations entirely, a number of Bitcoin miners have marketed themselves as “computing” or “digital infrastructure” companies while switching between minting digital currencies and providing computing for artificial intelligence – depending on which is more profitable.
Mining majors Terawulf, IREN and Cipher Mining last year signed multi-year HPC contracts with Alphabet Inc’s Google and Microsoft.
Both the cryptocurrency mining and high-performance computing (HPC) industries require massive amounts of power and data centers — but this step isn’t always easy: AI data centers require more expertise than Bitcoin mining.
