Hut 8 has commercialized the first phase of its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas through a 15-year lease covering 352 megawatts of IT capacity, with base-term contract value of $9.8 billion. According to Hut 8's May 6 announcement, the tenant is an undisclosed high-investment-grade company that will use dedicated infrastructure for AI training and inference.

What changed

Hut 8 said the deal turns a site originally positioned for bitcoin-mining demand into its second major AI data center campus. The company said Beacon Point has an interconnection agreement for 1,000 MW of utility capacity, with initial energization expected in Q1 2027 and the first data hall targeted for delivery in Q3 2027.

The company also said the lease includes three five-year renewal options that could raise total contract value to about $25.1 billion if fully exercised. Hut 8 described the project as a triple-net lease and said the first phase is designed to NVIDIA's DSX reference architecture.

Why it matters

The announcement is another concrete example of a listed bitcoin miner repositioning power-heavy sites toward AI infrastructure. Hut 8 said the Beacon Point deal lifts its total contracted AI data center capacity to 597 MW and aggregate base-term contract value to about $16.8 billion.

That does not guarantee every future expansion gets built, and Hut 8 has not named the tenant. Still, a signed 15-year lease is a more durable milestone than a generic mining-to-AI pivot plan. CoinDesk separately reported that investors pushed Hut 8 shares sharply higher after the announcement, showing how closely the market is watching miners that can turn power access into long-term AI capacity.