Hut 8 Stock Flies On $9.8b AI Lease Despite Q1 Loss

@Hut8Corp shares surged as much as 36% on Wednesday after the company announced a landmark 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for 352 MW of AI data center capacity at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas. Hut 8's share price has more than doubled in the last month alone, with Wednesday's early peak representing an all-time high for the stock.

A Landmark AI Infrastructure Deal

The deal, announced on May 6, 2026, marks the commercialization of the first phase of the Beacon Point data center campus through a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for 352 megawatts of IT capacity. The tenant is described only as a confidential, high-investment-grade company. On the earnings call, CEO Asher Genoot ruled out Anthropic and Google as the counterparty. Rent will increase by 3% each year, generating an estimated $655 million once everything is fully operational. Three five-year renewal options could increase the potential contract value to approximately $25.1 billion, assuming all options are exercised.

Hut 8 will deliver a 352 MW AI factory designed to NVIDIA's DSX reference architecture for gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure. Initial data hall delivery is expected in Q3 2027. Hut 8 said its unnamed tenant will use the compute infrastructure to support AI training and "inference workloads at hyperscale."

The Beacon Point transaction brings Hut 8's total contracted AI data center capacity to 597 MW of IT capacity, with aggregate base-term contract value of approximately $16.8 billion and aggregate average annual NOI of approximately $1.1 billion. The company is also executing the project in partnership with American Electric Power, Vertiv, and Jacobs.

Mixed Q1 Financials

The AI compute company and bitcoin miner reported Q1 revenue of $71 million, compared to the FactSet analyst consensus estimate of $78.4 million. That still represents a sharp improvement from the $21.8 million reported in Q1 2025. Hut 8 posted a net loss of $253 million, an increase of 89% from the $134 million loss it reported during the same period last year. The bulk of that loss stems from unrealized mark-to-market adjustments on its $BTC holdings under fair-value accounting rules, a dynamic that also drove Strategy's headline loss in the same period.

Hut 8's deal extends a recent streak of bitcoin mining firms pivoting to embrace the growing AI compute opportunity, with major companies in the space signing multi-billion-dollar data center deals alongside their mining operations. The company stated that the project was originally underwritten for a different commercialization pathway tied to American Bitcoin Corp. before being repositioned toward AI infrastructure as demand evolved.

Sources:
Hut 8 Official Press Release via PR Newswire
Bloomberg: Hut 8 to Lease Texas AI Data Center for at Least $9.8 Billion
The Block: Hut 8 Shares Soar Over 30% After $9.8 Billion AI Data Center Deal