Hut 8’s $9.8B Lease Sparks AI Compute Stocks Rebound
A 15-year Texas data-center deal and IREN's $2.8B contracts eased worries that the AI buildout was slowing.
In Brief
- Hut 8 jumped as much as 17% on a $9.8B, 15-year lease for its Texas AI campus.
- IREN added as much as 19% on $2.8B in new cloud contracts, lifting peers across the compute sector.
- The rebound eased investor fears sparked by cheaper Chinese open-source models and Meta’s potential cloud entry.
Shares of Bitcoin miners turned AI infrastructure providers surged Monday after Hut 8 and IREN announced billions of dollars in new contracts, easing concerns that demand for AI computing capacity might be slowing. Hut 8 rose as much as 17% after signing a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for the second phase of its Beacon Point AI data-center campus in Texas. the deals sparked a sector-wide rebound.
The Hut 8 agreement, with the same investment-grade customer that leased the first phase, doubles the tenant’s footprint to 704 megawatts and fully commercializes the site’s 1 gigawatt of power capacity. IREN gained as much as 19% after announcing $2.8 billion in new multiyear cloud services contracts with AI developers, and raised its year-end AI cloud annualized run-rate target above $4 billion, saying about 85% of that revenue is now under contract.
The news spilled over to peers. Cipher Mining rose 11% and TeraWulf added 6.4%, while Riot Platforms and MARA Holdings advanced 5% and 9% respectively. The CoinShares Bitcoin Miners ETF climbed 8.5%.
Separately, the rebound eased investor fears sparked by cheaper Chinese open-source models and Meta’s potential cloud entry.
Why Hut 8’s rebound matters
The surge arrives after AI infrastructure companies stumbled in recent weeks as investors questioned whether the industry’s breakneck data-center spending would continue. Sentiment cooled after Chinese firms released open-source AI models that appeared to require less computing power than Western rivals, raising the specter that demand for expensive capacity could soften.
Reports that Meta Platforms was considering a cloud service to rent AI computing capacity also stoked fears that new supply from a deep-pocketed entrant could weigh on data-center operators’ pricing. Monday’s contracts directly countered both narratives: a 15-year, investment-grade lease is about as far from “demand is slowing” as a deal gets.
The episode underscores how sentiment in the AI-infrastructure trade can flip on a single anchor tenant. It also connects to the wider question of whether the buildout is sustainable, a thread running through .
The bigger buildout context
Hut 8’s fully commercialized 1 GW site is a marker of how quickly miners have converted power contracts into AI capacity. The Beacon Point phase-two lease effectively removes a large block of Texas power from the “available” column and binds it to a creditworthy customer for a decade and a half.
For the sector, the takeaway is that hyperscaler and enterprise demand is still outrunning supply, even if the stocks had begun to price in a pause. That dovetails with that show the largest buyers locking in capacity rather than waiting.
Whether the rebound holds depends on the next wave of leases—but for one trading session at least, the market decided the AI data-center trade is not done yet.
FAQ
How much did Hut 8’s deal worth and what did it cover?
Hut 8 signed a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for the second phase of its Beacon Point AI data-center campus in Texas, doubling the tenant’s footprint to 704 MW and fully commercializing 1 GW of capacity.
Which other stocks moved?
IREN rose as much as 19% on $2.8B in new contracts; Cipher Mining gained 11%, TeraWulf 6.4%, Riot 5%, MARA 9%, and the CoinShares Bitcoin Miners ETF 8.5%.
What fears did the deals ease?
They countered worries that AI data-center demand was slowing after cheaper Chinese open-source models and reports of Meta’s potential cloud entry raised oversupply concerns.
