Hut 8 misses on earnings, but shares fly on $9.8 billion lease for Texas AI data center campus
Shares of Hut 8 are up more than 34% in early trading on Wednesday on news the firm signed a $9.8 billion deal to lease its AI facility in Texas over a 15-year period to provide compute capacity for a “high-investment-grade” company.
While the tenant of Hut 8’s Texas data center campus remains confidential, the firm’s CEO, Asher Genoot, said in an earnings call that the tenant is not Anthropic nor Google.
The announcement comes on the same day the firm released its first-quarter earnings, which missed analysts’ expectations.
The AI compute company and bitcoin miner reported Q1 revenue of $71 million, compared to the FactSet analyst consensus estimate of $78.4 million.
Hut 8 also reported a Q1 net loss of $134.3 million versus a loss of $250.7 million for the prior year period.
“We continue to execute against our 2025 roadmap by advancing potential catalysts for topline growth, including the energization of Vega, the initial sitework at River Bend, and the development of our utility-scale power portfolio,” Genoot said.
“We believe these initiatives will further accelerate our ability to generate resilient near-term cash flows while building toward enduring leadership across next-generation digital infrastructure markets,” Genoot continued.
On Monday, Hut 8 entered into a $200 million bitcoin-backed credit facility with crypto prime broker FalconX, a move that not only replaces its prior arrangement with Coinbase but also reduces debt costs.
Bloomberg also reported last week that the company sold $3.25 billion of investment-grade bonds to finance the development of a turnkey data center tied to Google.