Hut 8 Soars Over 14% Intraday, Signs $9.8 Billion AI Data Center Lease, Driving Hash Rate Sector Rebound

BlockBeats News, July 20th, the stock price of Bitcoin mining firm and AI infrastructure company Hut 8 rose on Monday, surging over 14% at one point during the trading day, after the company announced a $9.8 billion, 15-year AI data center leasing agreement with an investment-grade tenant.

The agreement covers the second-phase construction of Hut 8's Beacon Point AI Data Center campus in Texas, USA, adding 352MW of AI computing capacity based on NVIDIA's data center architecture, bringing the total leased capacity of the campus to 704MW and achieving full commercialization of 1GW power capacity.

Hut 8 stated that this lease agreement has increased the base contract value in the first phase of the lease term to $19.6 billion.

Boosted by the news, stocks related to high-performance computing (HPC) also rose, with IREN surging about 15% intraday, Cipher Mining rising 11%, TeraWulf rising 6.4%, and the Bitcoin Mining Firm ETF (WGMI) rising 9.3%.

Previously, the AI infrastructure sector had been under pressure due to market concerns about the sustainability of data center investments. Recent developments, including Chinese companies launching open-source AI models with low computational requirements, and Meta considering launching AI computing power cloud services, have raised market concerns about potential future oversupply of computing power.

Hut 8's long-term lease agreement is seen by the market as a significant signal of continued growth in AI computing demand, leading to improved sentiment in related sectors.