Hut 8 Beacon Point Campus Fully Leased in $9.8B AI Deal

A Gigawatt Campus Went From First Lease to Fully Leased

Hut 8 signed a second 352 MW IT lease at its Beacon Point campus in Texas, and with that signature the entire 1 gigawatt site is spoken for. The tenant is the same counterparty that took phase one - described as high investment grade - and it just doubled its footprint to 704 MW. Shares rose as much as 17% on the news. Let's unpack what a lease like this actually is, because "megawatts under contract" has quietly become the number the whole compute sector gets measured on.

• The new 352 MW lease carries $9.8 billion in base-term contract value over 15 years, with a 3.0% annual base rent escalator.
• The lease is expected to produce roughly $655 million in annual NOI at stabilization; the full 1,000 MW campus implies $19.6 billion in base-term value and about $1.31 billion in average annual NOI.
• Hut 8 now has 949 MW contracted across Beacon Point (704 MW) and River Bend (245 MW), worth $26.6 billion aggregate, 100% leased to investment-grade counterparties.
• Initial energization is targeted for Q1 2027, with phase-two delivery in Q2 2028, backed by AEP Texas interconnection.

What Is a 352 MW "IT Lease," Exactly?

Think of it less like renting servers and more like renting a very large, very reliable electrical outlet with a building attached. The landlord - Hut 8 here - builds the shell, the power interconnection, the cooling and the distribution. The tenant brings the GPUs. The lease is denominated in IT megawatts, meaning power actually delivered to compute, not the gross draw of the whole site.

The financial shape is closer to commercial real estate than to tech. There is a base term (15 years), a fixed annual escalator (3.0%), renewal options, and NOI - net operating income, the rent left after operating costs. Stack those and you get the "base-term contract value" headline: $9.8 billion for this lease, $19.6 billion for the campus, and as much as $50.2 billion in campus contract value if every renewal option is exercised. That last figure is an option case, not a booked number - worth keeping the two mentally separate.

Why Do Contracted Megawatts Matter More Than Anything Else Right Now?

Because power is the scarce input. Chips can be bought, capital can be raised, but an energized site with a signed interconnection agreement takes years. So when investors size an AI infrastructure business, they increasingly count three things: how many megawatts are contracted, how long the contracts run, and how creditworthy the tenant is.

Hut 8's disclosure is built to answer exactly those three. Duration: 15-year base terms. Credit: 100% investment-grade counterparties. Volume: 949 MW. That framing is the same one public data center pure-plays lean on - see the Csquare data center IPO and NYSE debut for how a newly listed operator pitches the identical metrics to a public market.

The Same-Day IREN Print

Hut 8 was not alone. IREN gained as much as 19% after announcing $2.8 billion in new multiyear AI cloud contracts and lifting its year-end AI Cloud annualized run-rate revenue target above $4 billion, with roughly 85% of that already under contract. Different model - IREN is selling cloud capacity rather than leasing shells - but the same underlying signal: demand is being locked in on multiyear paper rather than sold spot.

CEO Asher Genoot summed up the Hut 8 side as going "from first lease to full commercialization in just months," which is genuinely fast for infrastructure of this size. The broader buildout story runs through the compute supply chain too, including the inference layer covered in our look at Fireworks AI's inference platform funding.

What to Watch From Here

The execution milestones are the honest scorecard: energization in Q1 2027 and phase-two delivery in Q2 2028. Contracted revenue only becomes real revenue when the power flows and the tenant moves in, so delivery timing is the thing to track rather than the headline dollar figure.

To be clear about what this piece is: a description of business mechanics on the stock-trading beat, not investment advice and not a recommendation about any security.

Sources: Hut 8 press release via PR Newswire - July 20, 2026; CoinDesk - July 20, 2026; The Block - July 20, 2026.