Bitcoin miner Hut 8 (HUT) announced a 15-year, $7 billion lease agreement with Fluidstack today to develop AI infrastructure in Louisiana. The stock jumped over 20% in pre-market trading as the company secured a critical financial backstop from Google.
The Deal Mechanics
This is not a memorandum of understanding. It is a binding lease for 245 megawatts (MW) of compute capacity at Hut 8’s River Bend campus. Under the terms, Fluidstack will lease the facility to host high-performance computing clusters for AI model developer Anthropic.
The contract value sits at $7 billion for the base term. Three five-year renewal options could push the total value to $17.7 billion. Revenue streams are secured by a corporate guarantee from Google (Alphabet Inc.), covering all lease payments if Fluidstack defaults.
Institutional Validation
The Google backstop effectively de-risks the project for lenders. Hut 8 expects to secure project-level financing for up to 85% of construction costs, with J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs acting as underwriters.
Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot framed the deal as a solution to the grid constraints choking AI scalability:
Scaling frontier AI infrastructure is, at its core, a power challenge. Hut 8’s power-first, innovation-driven development model enables us to originate and develop greenfield data center sites at the pace and scale required by leading model developers.
The Pivot to HPC
Bitcoin miners are aggressively reallocating power capacity to high-performance computing (HPC). AI clients offer stable, long-term contracts compared to the volatility of crypto mining revenue. The River Bend project has room to run. The agreement grants Fluidstack a right of first offer on an additional 1,000 MW of capacity.
Tranche 1 of the deployment targets a Q2 2027 commissioning. If fully realized, the partnership with Anthropic could scale up to 2,295 MW across Hut 8’s portfolio.
