Hut 8 Corp, the Canadian Bitcoin mining and energy infrastructure firm, has made a bold move into the artificial intelligence sector, announcing a $7 billion, 15-year lease agreement with AI cloud company Fluidstack for a major data center at its River Bend campus in St. Francisville, Louisiana.
The deal, backed financially by Google, signals the company’s strategic pivot from cryptocurrency mining toward large-scale AI infrastructure, a move that has already fueled a dramatic surge in its stock price.
A transformative partnership
Under the terms of the agreement, Fluidstack will lease 245 megawatts of computing capacity at River Bend for a base term of 15 years.
Google is providing a financial backstop for the lease, guaranteeing payment obligations and certain pass-through costs, though it will not operate the site or utilize the AI workloads directly.
Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot described the transaction as the result of disciplined execution, emphasizing the integration of power, data center design, and compute deployment into a platform capable of scaling to gigawatt levels.
The agreement also includes three five-year renewal options that could raise the total contract value to approximately $17.7 billion, highlighting the long-term potential of the project.
Beyond the River Bend lease, the partnership grants Fluidstack a right of first offer for up to an additional 1,000 megawatts of future capacity at the campus, subject to available power.
Anthropic, the AI research lab, will act as the end user for server clusters operated by Fluidstack and has the option to expand capacity alongside Hut 8 across multiple US sites.
Notably, the partnership aims to bring additional AI infrastructure online by early 2027, reinforcing the company’s ambitions to become a major player in hyperscale AI computing.
Hut 8’s plan to expand beyond crypto
Hut 8’s shift toward AI infrastructure represents a significant evolution for a company that has long been known for its Bitcoin mining operations. Its majority-owned affiliate, American Bitcoin, co-founded by Genoot and Eric Trump, remains a central component of the firm’s crypto portfolio, while strategic investors, including Donald Trump Jr., continue to maintain a stake in the business.
This dual focus allows Hut 8 to leverage its expertise in energy-intensive operations while diversifying into the rapidly growing AI sector.
The River Bend project also draws on a wide network of partners. Financial backing and project-level financing are supported by Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, while Entergy provides utility capacity and engineering support comes from Vertiv and Jacobs.
The agreement is structured to generate substantial long-term revenue, with estimated cumulative net operating income of $6.9 billion over the base term, averaging around $454 million per year.
With construction of the initial River Bend data hall expected to complete in the second quarter of 2027, Hut 8 is set to expand its footprint in AI at a time when demand for high-performance computing continues to accelerate globally.
Hut 8 stock jumps on the AI deal
Following the announcement on December 17, Hut 8 stock price soared in premarket trading by 21%, reflecting investor enthusiasm for the company’s pivot to AI and high-performance computing. The surge erased a recent five-day loss, pushing the stock to a year-to-date gain of roughly 80%.
The premarket jump was followed by a 12.27% gain in regular trading, highlighting strong market confidence in the company’s new direction.