Hut 8 and IREN, two companies originally rooted in Bitcoin mining, announced massive new artificial intelligence infrastructure agreements on Monday, signaling a continued pivot toward high-performance computing. The deals underscore how former crypto miners are leveraging their power assets and data center expertise to capture demand from AI clients.
Hut 8 fully commercializes its 1 GW Texas campus with a second 15-year lease worth $9.8 billion at its Beacon Point site in Nueces County. The agreement covers 352 megawatts of IT capacity and doubles the unnamed investment-grade tenant’s total contracted footprint to 704 MW. The base-term contract value for the campus now stands at $19.6 billion, with a potential total of $50.2 billion if all renewal options are exercised. Across its entire portfolio, Hut 8 now reports 949 MW of contracted AI data center capacity and an aggregate base-term contract value of $26.6 billion.
The company credited its redesign of the first data hall around Nvidia’s architecture for a 57% capacity increase within the same footprint, which likely influenced the tenant’s decision to double down. Hut 8 expects to begin delivering the first Phase 2 data hall in Q2 2028. HUT stock surged as much as 16% in premarket trading on the news and has more than quadrupled over the past 12 months.
IREN raised its AI cloud revenue target after signing $2.8 billion in new multi-year contracts. The company boosted its year-end 2026 annualized run-rate revenue target for AI cloud services to more than $4 billion, up from $3.7 billion, with roughly 85% of that target already under contract. IREN named Microsoft, Nvidia, Perplexity, Figure AI, and others among its customers. Recent agreements include advance payments covering about 45% of related GPU capital spending. IREN shares rose 8% in premarket.
These announcements continue a broader trend in which Bitcoin miners — who control extensive power connections and data center infrastructure — are shifting toward AI. As crypto.news noted, over $70 billion in AI and HPC contracts had already been announced across publicly traded mining companies before these latest deals.
