Bitcoinjul 21, 2026

Hut 8 Stock Jumps 10% After Second $9.8B AI Lease Doubles Site to 704 MW

Hut 8 shares hit $106 as a new 15-year, $9.8B lease pushes Beacon Point's contract value to $19.6B, up to $50.2B with renewals.

Marcus Hale

Markets Editor. Marcus covers macro, ETFs and the

2 min read

Hut 8 Stock Jumps 10% After Second $9.8B AI Lease Doubles Site to 704 MW

Hut 8 shares closed up more than 10% on Monday after the bitcoin miner turned AI infrastructure operator announced a second 15-year lease worth $9.8 billion at its Beacon Point campus in Texas. The stock, listed on both the Toronto Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, spiked as high as $106 during the session before settling near $101.

The new lease adds 352 megawatts of IT capacity to the site and doubles the existing tenant’s total footprint there to 704 MW. Combined with the earlier agreement, Beacon Point’s base-term contract value now stands at $19.6 billion over 15 years — a figure that could climb as high as $50.2 billion if the tenant exercises its renewal options.

What the numbers say about Hut 8’s pivot

The scale of the commitment — nearly $10 billion for a single lease expansion — signals that Hut 8’s shift from pure bitcoin mining toward power-first AI infrastructure is finding real customer demand, not just speculative interest. Doubling an existing tenant’s capacity at the same site is typically read by markets as a stronger validation signal than winning a brand-new client, since it implies the original deployment performed well enough to justify expansion.

Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot framed the deal in similar terms: “The real test of our power-first approach is what our partners are willing to commit against it. Our tenant at Beacon Point chose to double its footprint at the site, the strongest validation an asset can receive.”

Part of a broader build-out

The Beacon Point expansion follows a string of infrastructure moves by Hut 8. In December, the company secured a Google-backed partnership with Anthropic and Fluidstack to develop up to 2.3 gigawatts of AI data center capacity across the U.S. — a scale that dwarfs typical bitcoin mining power draws and underscores how far the company has moved toward compute-as-a-service.

Hut 8 also has ties to American Data Centers Inc., a venture backed by President Donald Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr. Last year, Hut 8 contributed bitcoin mining equipment to help launch the pair’s American Bitcoin mining firm, adding a political dimension to the company’s expanding infrastructure footprint.

Why it matters for miners and investors

For bitcoin mining investors, the Beacon Point deal is another data point in a trend that has reshaped the sector’s valuation logic: publicly listed miners increasingly derive equity value from AI hosting contracts rather than hash rate alone. A double-digit single-day stock move on a leasing announcement — rather than a mining or hash-rate update — shows how sensitive Hut 8’s share price has become to its data center pipeline.

With base-term contract value already at $19.6 billion and a ceiling of $50.2 billion on renewals, Beacon Point alone now represents a multi-decade revenue commitment far larger than most standalone bitcoin mining operations generate. Whether that translates into sustained share price gains will depend on execution — building out 704 MW of capacity is a heavy capital and construction undertaking — but the lease terms give Hut 8 a long runway of contracted cash flow to work with.