Shares of Hut 8 (NASDAQ: HUT) soared 30% in pre-market trading Wednesday after the Miami-based company announced a massive $9.8 billion, 15-year triple-net lease agreement for artificial intelligence infrastructure at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas.
Deal Details: 352 MW for AI Training and Inference
The contract covers 352 megawatts of IT capacity and involves an unnamed tenant described as a “high investment-grade company” that will deploy infrastructure for AI training and inference workloads. Beacon Point is designed as a gigawatt-scale campus with a 1,000 MW utility interconnection agreement with AEP Texas. The first phase, representing approximately 500 MW of utility capacity supporting 352 MW of IT load, is expected to commence operations in the first quarter of 2027, with initial data hall deliveries targeted for the third quarter of the same year.
Second Major AI Deal Brings Total to $16.8 Billion
This agreement marks the second large-scale AI data center commercialization for Hut 8, following its previously announced River Bend project with cloud AI firm Fluidstack. Together, the two campuses now represent 597 MW of contracted IT capacity and an aggregate base contract value of approximately $16.8 billion. Once stabilized, the Beacon Point lease is expected to contribute an average of $655 million in annual net operating income. Including three five-year renewal options, the potential contract value could reach approximately $25.1 billion.
Power-First Strategy and Design Upgrade
Hut 8 explicitly described Beacon Point as an example of its “power-first” development strategy, where the company secures large-scale electricity access before determining commercialization. The site was originally designed to support the Bitcoin mining operations of its affiliate American Bitcoin Corp. (NASDAQ: ABTC) before being pivoted to AI infrastructure. The company also revealed that it redesigned the first building at Beacon Point based on NVIDIA’s evolving DSX AI factory reference architecture, which increased planned IT capacity from 224 MW to 352 MW — a 57% improvement — without expanding the land or underlying utility footprint.
Financing and Industry Shift
The Beacon Point lease structure reflects a growing trend in AI infrastructure financing, where operators favor long-term, infrastructure-style leases backed by investment-grade partners. Hut 8 plans to fund the project through asset-based financing structures designed to lower capital costs while limiting corporate debt ratio pressure. Earlier this month, Hut 8 separately closed a $3.25 billion bond offering to fund its River Bend campus associated with its 15-year lease with Fluidstack.
This latest deal further solidifies the broader shift among Bitcoin miners and power-focused infrastructure operators, who are increasingly repositioning large-scale power campuses toward AI and hyperscale computing as demand for high-density GPU infrastructure surges.