Bitcoin BTC$64,432.07 Miner and AI infrastructure developer Hut8 (HUT) soared as much as 14% after announcing a $9.8 billion 15-year lease for the second phase of its Beacon Point data center campus in Texas, contributing to the sector-wide share price rally.
The agreement was signed with the same investment grade tenant that leased the first phase of the project and will fully commercialize the 1 GW campus. Hut 8 builds an additional 352 megawatts (MW) of AI computing capacity based on Nvidia’s data center architecture, bringing total tenant contracted capacity at the site to 704 MW.
The second lease fully commercializes Beacon Point’s 1 gigawatt of power capacity and increases the campus’ base commitment value to $19.6 billion over the first lease term.
Hut 8 rose to $104.51 on Monday, and the announcement rippled through its high-performance computing peers. In early trading, IREN (IREN) was up 15%, Cipher Mining (CIFR) was up 11%, and Terrawolf (WULF) was up 6.4%. The CoinShares Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI) rose 9.3%.
The stock’s jump comes as AI infrastructure companies have stumbled in recent weeks as investors question whether the industry’s frenzied spending on data centers will continue.
The initially positive sentiment cooled after the Chinese company released an open source AI model that appeared to require less computing power than its Western rivals. Earlier, reports that Facebook’s parent company Metaplatforms (META) was considering a cloud service to rent AI computing power also raised concerns that additional supply could weigh on data center operators.
