Hut 8 said Wednesday it has signed a deal valued at about $7 billion to lease a data center in Louisiana, underscoring how former bitcoin miners are pivoting toward artificial intelligence hosting.
The company’s shares rose 21% in premarket trading, adding to an approximately 80% gain this year.
Deal details
Hut 8 said it will sign a 15-year lease agreement to develop a 245-megawatt data center at the River Bend campus.
Construction of the first phase is expected to be completed by early 2027.
Miners pivot to AI hosting
Reuters said the shift from bitcoin mining to AI hosting has become a key trend for firms such as Hut 8, CoreWeave, and Applied Digital.
The companies are repurposing access to high-voltage power, cooling systems, and specialized real estate, which have become scarce as AI developers race to deploy Nvidia hardware.
Hut 8, once a pure-play bitcoin miner, has spent the last year repositioning itself as an energy infrastructure platform.
Partners and potential scale
The new deal involves partnerships with AI model developer Anthropic and infrastructure provider Fluidstack.
Alphabet-owned Google is providing a financial backstop for the 15-year term.
The agreement is also part of a broader collaboration between Hut 8 and Anthropic that could eventually scale to 2.3 gigawatts of capacity.
Hut 8 said last month it had a total power pipeline of 8.65 gigawatts, spanning early-stage site diligence through 1.53 gigawatts of late-stage projects under active development.
