Hut 8 Shares Surge 14% After $9.8 Billion AI Data Center Lease

Hut 8 shares jumped after the Bitcoin miner and AI infrastructure company announced a major long-term lease, lifting other stocks across the sector.

CoinDesk reported on July 20 that Hut 8 signed a 15-year lease for Phase 2 of its Vega Point data center campus in Texas. The agreement is valued at $9.8 billion.

The tenant is the same investment-grade customer that leased the Phase 1 facility. Hut 8 plans to add 352 megawatts of AI computing capacity based on Nvidia data center architecture. That would bring the tenant’s total contracted capacity to 704 megawatts and fully commercialize the Vega Point campus’s 1-gigawatt power capacity. The campus’s total base contracted value would rise to $19.6 billion over the initial lease term.

Hut 8 shares rose as much as 14% intraday to $104.51 on the day of the announcement. The rally spread across the high-performance computing sector, with IREN up 15%, Cipher Mining gaining 11% and TeraWulf rising 6.4%. The CoinShares Bitcoin Miners ETF, WGMI, also climbed 9.3%.

The surge came after weeks of declines in AI infrastructure stocks. Chinese companies had released open-source AI models that require less computing power than Western rivals, stoking doubts about data center demand. A report that Meta Platforms was considering a cloud service to lease AI computing capacity also weighed on sentiment by fueling concerns about oversupply.