Hut 8 and Cipher Digital Soar on AI Data Center Megadeals

Hut 8 stock surged approximately 32% after announcing a landmark 15-year lease for its Beacon Point AI data center campus. The deal is with a confidential, high-investment-grade tenant for 352 megawatts of IT capacity dedicated to AI training and inference workloads. The base-term contract value is a staggering $9.8 billion, with potential to reach $25.1 billion if all renewal options are exercised.

This massive lease expands Hut 8's total contracted AI data center capacity to 597 megawatts across two campuses, bringing its aggregate base-term contract value to about $16.8 billion. The company also reported first-quarter revenue of $71 million, primarily driven by its Compute segment.

In a similar move, Cipher Digital stock closed up 23.5% after reporting its own first-quarter results. The company highlighted momentum in AI and high-performance computing (HPC) data centers, having signed its third AI data center campus lease with an investment-grade hyperscale tenant during the quarter.

The back-to-back rallies signal a powerful shift in investor sentiment, moving beyond the volatile legacy crypto-mining business to focus on these firms' new, contracted revenue streams from the AI boom.

This news matters because it validates a crucial business model pivot. Companies like Hut 8 and Cipher are leveraging their existing assets—primarily access to large amounts of power and land—to become critical infrastructure providers for the AI revolution. Securing long-term contracts with creditworthy tenants transforms their revenue from speculative and cyclical to predictable and durable.

The sheer scale of the Hut 8 deal, potentially worth over $25 billion, demonstrates the enormous financial stakes in the AI infrastructure race. It proves that hyperscale companies are willing to commit billions for guaranteed, dedicated compute capacity, creating a massive new market for infrastructure players.

For stock prices, this shift re-rates these companies from being valued as volatile crypto miners to being valued as infrastructure-as-a-service providers with contracted, recurring revenue. The market is now pricing in the stability and growth potential of these AI deals, which far outweighs the legacy mining business.

The success also highlights a key competitive advantage: the ability to rapidly convert power access into monetizable AI capacity. This positions firms with ready power and development capabilities as highly attractive partners in a space where time-to-market is critical.