bitcoin Miner and AI infrastructure developer Hut 8 (HUT) rose as much as 14% after announcing a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for the second phase of its Beacon Point data center campus in Texas, helping lift shares across the sector.
The agreement, signed with the same investment-grade tenant that leased the first phase of the project, fully commercializes the 1-gigawatt campus. Hut 8 will build a further 352 megawatts (MW) of AI computing capacity based on Nvidia’s data center architecture, bringing the tenant’s total contracted capacity at the site to 704 MW.
The second lease fully commercializes Beacon Point’s 1 gigawatt of power capacity and brings the base campus contract value to $19.6 billion over the initial lease term.
Hut 8 rose to $104.51 on Monday and the announcement spread to its peers in the high-performance computing sector. IREN (IREN) rose 15%, Cipher Mining (CIFR) gained 11% and TeraWulf (WULF) added 6.4% in early trading. The CoinShares Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI) advanced 9.3%.
The share price rise comes after AI infrastructure companies stumbled in recent weeks as investors wondered whether the industry’s breakneck spending on data centers would continue.
Earlier optimism cooled after Chinese companies launched open-source artificial intelligence models that appeared to require less computing power than their Western rivals. Before that, reports that Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META) was considering a cloud service to rent AI computing capacity also raised concerns that the additional supply could hit data center operators.
