Hut 8 Shares Jump 20% After $7B Fluidstack AI Data Center Lease

Hut 8 shares jumped about 20% in pre-market trading on Wednesday after the company announced a 15-year, $7 billion lease with AI cloud provider Fluidstack for a data center development in Louisiana.

Hut 8 said in a release that the lease covers 245 megawatts of IT capacity at Hut 8’s River Bend data center campus in West Feliciana Parish. The agreement includes a right of first offer for Fluidstack on up to an additional 1,000 MW of capacity in future expansion phases, subject to the availability of power at the site.

Hut 8 said the agreement is structured as a triple-net lease and includes a 3% annual base rent escalator over the initial term. Hut 8 claimed that the lease is expected to generate approximately $454 million in average annual net operating income over the 15-year base term, or roughly $6.9 billion in total.

Fluidstack’s lease obligations and related pass-through costs are backed by Google, which is providing a financial backstop, according to the company.

Construction at the River Bend campus is expected to deliver the first data hall by the second quarter of 2027, with additional data halls scheduled to come online later that year. Hut 8 said it plans to finance the project at the site level, with up to 85% loan-to-cost funding expected to be underwritten by J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs, subject to final agreements and customary closing conditions.

Fluidstack has emerged as an increasingly active counterparty for bitcoin miners and energy infrastructure operators seeking to repurpose power-heavy sites for AI and high-performance computing workloads. Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Fluidstack was in talks to raise roughly $700 million in a funding round that would value the company at about $7 billion, underscoring growing investor interest in AI-focused data center platforms.

The company has also signed long-term leasing agreements with other publicly traded bitcoin miners as part of that expansion. Fluidstack previously announced colocation and infrastructure deals with Cipher Mining and Terawulf, as several miners seek to diversify away from pure bitcoin mining by leasing power and data center capacity to AI customers.

The Hut 8 deal marks another step in Hut 8’s transition from a pure-play bitcoin miner toward a broader digital infrastructure and energy platform, as mining companies increasingly pursue high-performance computing and artificial intelligence workloads amid volatile bitcoin economics.

Hut 8 said it has secured an initial 330 MW of utility capacity for River Bend through Entergy Louisiana, with the potential to expand power availability by up to an additional 1,000 MW in later phases. At full scale, the company said the campus could rank among the largest data center developments globally.

Jacobs is serving as the engineering, procurement and construction management partner for the project, alongside infrastructure provider Vertiv. Hut 8 said peak construction is expected to involve around 1,000 workers, with the completed campus initially supporting at least 75 direct jobs and roughly 190 indirect and induced jobs in the surrounding region.