Hut 8 fully commercializes 1 GW Texas AI campus with second $9.8B lease as IREN signs $2.8B in contracts; shares climb double digits

Shares of Hut 8 (HUT) and IREN (IREN) both climbed double digits on Monday after the bitcoin (BTC) miners announced fresh AI infrastructure deals worth billions, extending the sector's pivot from crypto mining toward data center leasing.

Hut 8 fully commercializes Beacon Point

Hut 8 signed a second 15-year, $9.8 billion lease at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas, fully commercializing the 1-gigawatt site, the company said.

The deal doubles the contracted capacity of the campus's existing investment-grade tenant to 704 MW. It was executed on substantially the same terms as the first Beacon Point lease and lifts the campus's combined base-term contract value to $19.6 billion.

Across Hut 8's broader AI data center portfolio, total contracted IT capacity now stands at 949 MW, split between 704 MW at Beacon Point and 245 MW at River Bend, carrying an aggregate base-term contract value of $26.6 billion and expected average annual net operating income of more than $1.75 billion, according to the release.

The tenant is the same high-investment-grade counterparty that signed the first Beacon Point lease in May, also a 15-year, $9.8 billion agreement for 352 MW of IT capacity built to NVIDIA's DSX reference architecture.

Hut 8 secured the site through what it calls a power-first model, locking down 1,000 MW of utility capacity under an interconnection agreement with AEP Texas before commercializing it through hyperscale leases. Three 5-year renewal options per lease could raise the campus's potential contract value to $50.2 billion.

"Our tenant at Beacon Point chose to double its footprint at the site, the strongest validation an asset can receive," Asher Genoot, CEO of Hut 8, said.

HUT shares rose over 16% following the news, The Block's stock page shows.

IREN raises revenue target on $2.8 billion in contracts

IREN lifted its year-end 2026 AI Cloud annualized run-rate revenue target to more than $4 billion from $3.7 billion after signing new multi-year cloud contracts representing $2.8 billion in total contract value, according to an announcement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Roughly 85% of the revised target is now under contract, the company said.

IREN's customer roster now spans Microsoft, NVIDIA, Perplexity, Figure AI, Together AI, Fluidstack, Fireworks AI, Fal AI, Hume AI, and an unnamed AI developer across bare metal and managed cloud services.

The recent contracts include customer prepayments that cover about 45% of the associated GPU capital expenditure, reducing IREN's net funding requirement for those deployments. The company held approximately $7.6 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of June 30.

Demand from hyperscalers, enterprises, and frontier labs continues to outstrip IREN's available and planned capacity, the company said. IREN's co-founder and co-chief executive, Daniel Roberts, said the company has scaled from roughly 3 megawatts of self-built AI Cloud capacity to 480 megawatts being delivered this year, with 1.2 gigawatts targeted for 2027.

Per The Block’s crypto stock page, IREN shares rose more than 17% after the disclosure.

The miner-to-AI trade

Both companies illustrate a broader shift among crypto miners repurposing secured grid power and data center expertise for AI customers.

Bernstein has argued that the miners' access to energy capacity gives them a structural edge in the race to deploy AI infrastructure, cutting deployment timelines against greenfield competitors.