Hut 8 signs $9.8 billion Texas lease for giant AI data center campus

Hut 8 has turned a Texas campus into a $9.8 billion bet that the artificial intelligence boom will be won not just in software, but in steel, substations and megawatts. The Miami-based company said it signed a 15-year lease for the first phase of its Beacon Point data center campus in Nueces County, a deal covering 352 megawatts of IT capacity and expanding its contracted AI footprint to 597 megawatts.

The agreement is structured as a take-or-pay, triple-net lease with no termination for convenience, locking the customer into paying for capacity even if its own computing needs change. Hut 8 chief executive Asher Genoot said the company has a 15-year obligation from a high-investment-grade counterparty, underscoring how far AI customers are now willing to commit to secure scarce power and space. The total base-term contract value across Hut 8’s two hyperscale AI campuses rose to about $16.8 billion.

Beacon Point is part of a planned 1-gigawatt campus and, according to Hut 8, has site and interconnection approvals secured for 1,000 megawatts. The company said 700 megawatts are expected by the first quarter of 2027, with the remaining 300 megawatts targeted for the fourth quarter of 2028, subject to system upgrades. The first building is scheduled for completion later in 2027, and the power connection is expected in early 2027.

The scale of the project highlights how the AI race has become a race for physical infrastructure. Hut 8 said the campus is being designed to Nvidia’s DSX reference architecture for gigawatt-scale AI systems, with American Electric Power, Vertiv and Jacobs among the partners involved. That mix points to the widening industrial chain behind AI: utilities, cooling, electrical systems and construction are now as central as chips and software.

Beacon Point is the second AI data center campus commercialized under Hut 8’s power-first development model, following River Bend. That earlier lease, announced in December 2025, covered 245 megawatts of IT capacity and carried a $7.0 billion base-term value, rising to as much as $17.7 billion if all renewal options are exercised. Hut 8 said it closed $3.25 billion of investment-grade senior secured notes for River Bend after quarter-end.

The Texas grid context makes the deal more consequential. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has been publishing long-term load forecasts and consulting on how to use them for reliability planning, as data centers and other large loads reshape demand growth. Hut 8’s shares jumped more than 25% on the announcement, a sign that investors see the company’s pivot from crypto mining to AI infrastructure as a model for the next phase of the buildout.