US mining companies strengthen collectively, Bitcoin mining firm HUT leads the surge by 35%

Bitcoin mining company Hut 8 Corp. announced on Wednesday the signing of a 15-year data center computing power rental agreement with a guaranteed value of 9.8 billion USD, causing the company's stock price to surge by more than 35% in a single day, reaching a historical high, and triggering a collective frenzy in the entire AI infrastructure and crypto miner sector.

Hut 8 stated that the agreement is for the first phase of its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas, with an IT capacity of 352 megawatts, and the lessee is an unnamed "high investment-grade company" that will deploy dedicated computing power for large-scale AI training and inference workloads. If the lessee exercises all three five-year renewal options, the total value of the contract could reach as high as 25.1 billion USD.

The locked capacity of 352 megawatts, coupled with a 15-year term, implies a stable long-term cash flow, which is extremely valuable in the current environment where AI computing power is in high demand.

Both JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs provide project financing support for the Beacon Point project, with analysts estimating that Hut 8's adjusted EBITDA will grow from approximately 130 million USD in 2026 to 746 million USD by 2028.

Sector sentiment is fully ignited

The news of HUT 8 quickly spread across the entire sector. Iris Energy (IREN) and TeraWulf (WULF) both closed with gains of more than 10%, while AI cloud computing company Nebius (NBIS) also rose by 11% on the same day. These companies have embarked on a similar transformation path—leveraging existing energy assets and land resources to transition into AI computing power renters.

Iris Energy is advancing its AI cloud service expansion, aiming to achieve annual recurring revenue of 3.4 billion USD by the end of 2026; Nebius has already secured a 17 billion USD long-term contract with Microsoft and plans to issue 3.75 billion USD in convertible bonds to further expand its data center scale.

Consecutive big deals confirm structural trends

This is not Hut 8's first move. In March of this year, the company signed a 15-year, 7 billion USD agreement with cloud infrastructure provider Fluidstack, deploying in the Louisiana River Bend campus (245 megawatts), supported by a Google-related party in financing. In April, Hut 8 proposed to issue 3.248 billion USD in senior secured notes to finance the project, with Fitch assigning a BBB- (expected) investment-grade rating.

The landing of this 9.8 billion USD agreement brings Hut 8's year-to-date increase to over 132%.

The industry pioneer Core Scientific previously signed a 590-megawatt, 12-year, over-10 billion USD computing power agreement with CoreWeave, setting a precedent. Market observers have pointed out that AI hyperscale operators face a severe shortage of computing power, and miners with ready access to electricity and land resources are becoming a "shortcut" to bypass the lengthy infrastructure approval process, accelerating the attraction of long-term locked purchases from tech giants.