Bitcoin Miner Hut 8 Pivots to AI Infrastructure With $7 Billion Data Center Lease

Hut 8 began as a Bitcoin mining company but has expanded its energy and computing assets into AI data centers in recent years. River Bend, located in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, is a multibillion-dollar development in its first phase alone. The water investment is critical to campus construction and local supply resilience, and it also reflects the company’s shift toward long-term AI infrastructure operations.

On May 19, 2026, Hut 8 announced an agreement with West Feliciana Parish to invest about $16 million in a new water well, roughly eight miles of transmission pipelines and other system upgrades. The work is expected to be completed in the second half of 2026 and then transferred to the parish at no cost. Taxpayers will bear no expense, and the project is estimated to benefit more than 4,000 households and over 200 employers.

Canada-founded Hut 8 began primarily as a bitcoin miner but has shifted in recent years toward using its power assets to support large-scale computing facilities. Deploying the first phase of its Beacon Point campus in Texas for AI extends its revenue model beyond cryptocurrency cycles into long-term infrastructure contracts. It also gives the company an entry into the high-density AI computing market through the NVIDIA DSX architecture.

Hut 8 said on May 6, 2026, that it had signed a 15-year lease for its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas. The agreement covers 352 MW of IT capacity and has a total base-term contract value of $9.8 billion, with annual rent increases of 3%. Hut 8 shares rose as much as about 36% in U.S. premarket trading after the announcement.

Core Scientific, traditionally focused on Bitcoin mining, is redirecting its existing power and data center assets toward hosting high-density AI computing. Rising electricity demand from AI model training has made miners' grid capacity and land holdings an advantage in the transition, which could also reshape the company's future revenue mix.

Core Scientific most recently announced that its Pecos site in Texas would join a data center plan totaling up to 1.5GW. It will also reallocate the site's existing 300MW of mining capacity to AI infrastructure. As of July 20, 2026, the company had not disclosed the investment amount, customer roster or full deployment schedule.