A former bitcoin miner just signed a $9.8 billion lease — and dragged the whole compute sector up with it

Shares of Canadian company Hut 8, known just a few years ago almost exclusively as a bitcoin miner, jumped 14% after the company signed a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for the second phase of its Beacon Point AI data center campus in Texas.

What's in the Deal

The agreement adds 352 megawatts of Nvidia-based AI compute capacity and fully commercializes the gigawatt-scale site — meaning the campus's entire potential is now under contract. With this second phase, the tenant's (whose name the company hasn't disclosed, only noting its investment-grade rating) total commitment at the site has grown to 704 megawatts — double what was locked in under the first deal. The campus's base-term contract value has reached $19.6 billion, with renewal options potentially pushing that figure as high as $50.2 billion.

How Big This Is for the Whole Company

Across Hut 8's entire AI data center portfolio, contracted capacity has risen to 949 megawatts, backed by 1,330 megawatts of available utility capacity. Aggregate base-term contract value across the whole portfolio is estimated at $26.6 billion, with average annual net operating income of more than $1.75 billion.

Why Other "Miners" Rose Too

The news lifted shares of several public companies historically focused on bitcoin mining that have pivoted toward providing AI compute capacity in recent years — including IREN, Cipher Mining, and TeraWulf, as well as the CoinShares Bitcoin Miners ETF. The market read Hut 8's deal as confirmation that the miner-to-AI-infrastructure pivot continues to find real, large-scale institutional demand.

Context: This Is Already the Second Such Jump

A similar, even sharper market reaction already happened to Hut 8 shares back in May 2026, when the company announced the first phase of this same $9.8 billion lease — shares jumped nearly 30% at the time. The fact that the second phase of the deal triggered another notable rally, rather than investor fatigue, suggests the market continues to treat the miner-to-AI-infrastructure pivot as a durable trend rather than a one-off story.

Why It Matters

Hut 8's story is a telling example of how companies originally built around cryptocurrency mining are increasingly turning into compute infrastructure providers for the artificial intelligence industry, using their existing power capacity and experience operating large data centers as a competitive edge in the race for AI customers.

This material is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice.