Bitcoin miners Hut 8 and Bitdeer Technologies Group are making headlines this week with major updates to their artificial intelligence infrastructure strategies, highlighting the industry’s accelerating shift away from pure-play mining. As Hut 8 prepares to report second-quarter earnings on August 4, 2026, the company is poised against one of the most difficult backdrops in years — depressed hash prices and rising network difficulty — while investors fixate on the rapid expansion of its AI data center business. Simultaneously, Bitdeer announced a colossal 16-year colocation deal in Norway worth $4.7 billion, sending its stock surging as much as 23%.
Hut 8’s earnings preview: Wall Street expects revenue of roughly $80 million and another quarterly loss, but analysts are largely ignoring short-term mining profitability. Instead, the focus is on the company’s AI pipeline, which includes the fully commercialized Beacon Point campus carrying $19.6 billion in long-term leases and an earlier $4.25 billion project financing package. The company has aggressively pivoted to leasing power and data center capacity to hyperscale AI clients, positioning itself as an energy infrastructure developer for AI model training and inference. Despite the execution risks of large-scale campus development, Hut 8 is increasingly viewed as a play on the AI boom rather than Bitcoin prices.
Bitdeer’s Norwegian breakthrough: In a parallel development, Bitdeer’s Tydal Data Center subsidiary signed a 16-year colocation agreement with Volta Tydal AS for an AI and high-performance computing campus. The deal covers 121 megawatts of critical IT capacity (supported by ~133 MW total), with expected contracted payments of $4.7 billion over the initial term. A one-time renewal option could stretch total value to $8 billion across 24 years. The average lease rates at about $202 per kilowatt per month, with 3% annual escalators, while electricity costs are reimbursed. Bitdeer projects a net operating margin of approximately 90%, excluding financing and corporate costs. Dell Technologies is the technology provider, and Volta will serve an unnamed leading AI lab using NVIDIA GPUs. The company retains full ownership of the site and will finance the $500 million build-out (about $4 million per IT MW) by raising debt, with support from up to $1.3 billion in letters of credit arranged by J.P. Morgan affiliates.
The big picture: Both announcements underscore the dramatic transformation of the Bitcoin mining sector since the 2024 halving slashed block rewards. With hash prices persistently low, miners are leveraging their power infrastructure and energy expertise to capture the surging demand for AI data centers. Hut 8’s upcoming Q2 report and Bitdeer’s August 10 earnings call will offer crucial updates on construction, financing, and customer deployment, testing whether these companies can balance the cyclicality of mining with the secular growth of artificial intelligence.
