The 15-year deal helps Hut 8 move towards long-term AI infrastructure income as hyperscalers want for computational capacity that puts power first.
Hut 8, a firm that mines Bitcoin, secured a 15-year, $7 billion contract to build 245 megawatts of artificial intelligence data centre space at its River Bend facility in Louisiana. This is one of the biggest infrastructure deals between a crypto-native company and hyperscale AI demand.
Hut 8 said on Wednesday that Fluidstack, an infrastructure provider, will rent the space, and Google will cover the lease payments and other costs for the first 15 years. If Fluidstack can’t pay the bills, Google will take care of them.
Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot stated that River Bend demonstrates the strength of Hut 8’s power-first, innovation-driven development model, and the world-class counterparties we are collaborating with serve as evidence of this.
The business announced that work on the building had already begun and that the first data hall will be finished and ready for use by the second quarter of 2027. More data halls are planned to open up during the following year.
Source: Hut 8
Google backup and institutional funding
Google’s involvement as a financial backstop, covering both pass-through obligations and lease payments during the base period, is a key part of the deal.
Hut 8 and Fluidstack are also set to sign an operations services agreement to keep managing the data centre, with Google promising to pay them more money.
Loans tied directly to the data centre will finance the project. Most of the building costs will be covered by big banks, which means that Hut 8 won’t have to put up as much money up front.
Noah Wintroub, global chairman of investment banking at JPMorgan Chase, said, “River Bend shows how Hut 8 can create real, lasting value when it brings together innovative thinking, a team that works well together, and institutional discipline.”
The deal makes Hut 8 more involved in the AI field, which they started doing in 2024. Hut 8 started delivering GPU-as-a-Service through its new company, Highrise AI, in September 2024. Hut 8 used the pivot to put more than 1,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs to work powering its cloud-based AI compute services.
Cryptocurrencies will make billions in the AI
Core Scientific said in June that it has signed a $3.5 billion deal with AI cloud provider CoreWeave to rent out its infrastructure for 12 years. Core Scientific is estimated to make $290 million a year from the purchase.
Galaxy Digital sped up the growth of its Helios AI data centre in Texas in August after getting a $1.4 billion loan that will cover nearly 80% of the project’s building expenses.
CoreWeave, an AI infrastructure company, also inked a 15-year contract with Galaxy Digital for power, cooling, and physical data centre equipment to help with its AI and high-performance computing work. Estimates suggest that Galaxy will earn approximately $1 billion annually from this arrangement.