TL;DR · 30-second read
The Short Version
Hut 8, a company that used to make most of its money mining bitcoin, has reportedly signed a $9.8 billion, 15-year deal to rent out a giant Texas building complex for artificial intelligence computers.
The surprise is the price. Measured per unit of electricity, it pays about the same as a similar deal a rival, CleanSpark, signed with Facebook’s parent company Meta.
If landlords like these all charge roughly the same rent, the winners will be whoever builds cheapest and borrows cheapest. That matters for the investors, towns and power grids hosting them.
StocksToTrade reported on September 18, 2026 that Hut 8 Corp. (Nasdaq: HUT) has signed a second 15-year lease worth about $9.8 billion for 352 megawatts (MW) of IT capacity at Beacon Point, its 1-gigawatt AI data center campus in Texas, with an investment-grade tenant. The lease fully commercializes the campus, doubles contracted capacity there to 704 MW and brings Hut 8’s contracted IT capacity across two campuses to 949 MW. The same report said Wells Fargo initiated coverage with an Overweight rating and a $175 price target, and that the shares rose 8.15% on the day.
The deal lands the same week CleanSpark priced $2.276 billion of 7.875% senior secured notes due 2031 to finish its Sandersville, Georgia campus, a 175 MW facility leased to a wholly owned Meta subsidiary, according to CleanSpark’s 8-K filings of September 17 and 18.
Executive Summary
Hut 8’s second Beacon Point lease is, at $9.8 billion, one of the largest contracts yet signed by a former bitcoin miner converting power and land into AI data center capacity. Its significance is less the headline total than what it implies about price: spread over 15 years and 352 MW, the lease works out to roughly $1.86 million per megawatt per year, almost exactly the rate implied by CleanSpark’s Meta-guaranteed Sandersville lease.
If long-term AI capacity from miners is clearing at a similar rent per megawatt, the lever that separates one landlord’s returns from another’s shifts from pricing to cost: what it takes to build each megawatt, and what it costs to borrow the money. CleanSpark’s filings put numbers on both for Sandersville, roughly $11.9 million of development cost per IT megawatt financed with 7.875% secured notes, which gives the industry a public benchmark against which Hut 8’s still-undisclosed build and financing terms will be judged.
Two Leases, One Price per Megawatt
Data center leases for AI are usually quoted by total contract value, which makes deals of different sizes and lengths hard to compare. Normalising them to dollars per megawatt of IT capacity per year (a megawatt is roughly enough power for several hundred homes; IT capacity is the power available to the servers themselves, excluding cooling and other overhead) puts them on the same footing.
Hut 8’s lease, at $9.8 billion over 15 years, implies about $653 million a year; divided across 352 MW, that is about $1.86 million per megawatt-year. CleanSpark’s September 17 investor presentation, filed as an exhibit to its 8-K, describes Sandersville as 175 MW of critical IT load under a 20-year base term with about $6.6 billion of contracted base-term value and about $330 million of average annual net operating income on a triple-net basis. That is about $1.89 million per megawatt-year. The two figures are within roughly 2% of each other.
Two leases do not make a market index, and the comparison has limits: CleanSpark discloses a 3% annual rent escalator, while Hut 8’s escalator, if any, has not been published, and both totals are nominal. Still, two investment-grade AI tenants contracting miner-built capacity at near-identical unit rents in the same month is a useful signal. It suggests tenants are paying for megawatts of ready capacity at something close to a going rate, rather than awarding premium pricing to any one developer.
When Rent Is Fixed, Capital Cost Is the Margin
Once rent per megawatt is set by the market, a landlord’s return is determined by what sits underneath it. CleanSpark’s presentation gives a rare public breakdown: about $11.9 million of development cost per IT megawatt, which at roughly $1.89 million of annual net operating income per megawatt implies a yield on cost of around 16% before financing. It then priced its notes at 98.5% of face value with a 7.875% coupon, so the effective borrowing cost is slightly above the coupon. The spread between those two figures is the project’s economic engine.
That arithmetic shows why build cost matters so much at a fixed rent. At the same $1.86 million per megawatt-year, every extra $1 million of build cost per megawatt lowers yield on cost by more than a percentage point, and across 352 MW it adds about $352 million of capital to be raised. Term length matters too: Hut 8’s 15-year term gives it five fewer years of contracted rent than CleanSpark’s 20-year base term to recover a comparable investment, making renewal options and the facility’s residual value more important to its returns.
Hut 8 starts from a leveraged position. StocksToTrade’s report cited roughly $7.4 billion of long-term debt, trailing revenue of about $235.1 million and a recent quarterly net loss of about $150.2 million. Contracted rent from an investment-grade tenant is exactly the collateral lenders want for project-level bonds like CleanSpark’s, but the price Hut 8 pays for that money, and the build cost it must fund, will determine whether the Beacon Point rent translates into margin.
From Mining Sites to Contracted Backlog
The broader shift is that bitcoin miners’ most valuable asset has turned out to be their grid connections and land, not their mining machines. Power interconnections for large loads can take years to secure, and miners already hold them. Hut 8 reports 949 MW of contracted IT capacity across two campuses, which by subtraction leaves 245 MW at the campus outside Beacon Point. CleanSpark says it controls about 1.8 GW of power, land and data centers across the United States.
For AI tenants and the cloud providers serving them, this cohort widens the pool of sites that can be delivered faster than a greenfield project. For the miners, long-term leases replace revenue tied to bitcoin prices with contracted rent from creditworthy counterparties, which is why an analyst like Wells Fargo can point to backlog and tenant quality rather than coin prices. StocksToTrade also linked Hut 8 to hosting hardware for Anthropic’s reported $35 billion compute arrangement with Lambda; Hut 8 has not published the terms of that role.
Execution Risk Moves to Power, Permits and Delivery Dates
Contracted rent only turns into cash once a facility is energised and handed over. CleanSpark targets initial rent commencement at Sandersville in Q4 2027 and has promised a completion guarantee to fund any shortfall if note proceeds prove insufficient, which shows how much of the risk remains with the developer until delivery. A 1-gigawatt campus in Texas carries the same exposure at larger scale: power delivery, equipment lead times for transformers and switchgear, and construction labour all have to line up on schedule.
Policy is a further variable. The StocksToTrade report noted a Massachusetts executive order requiring community approval, stricter environmental rules and clean energy or payments into a protection fund for new data centers. Hut 8’s growth is in Texas, but states are increasingly attaching conditions to large AI loads, and those conditions add cost to developers whose rent is already fixed for 15 or 20 years.
Background
Hut 8 Corp., listed on Nasdaq as HUT, built its business on bitcoin mining and has been repositioning its power and land portfolio toward AI data centers. Beacon Point, its 1-gigawatt campus in Texas, is now fully leased across two 15-year contracts, and the company counts 949 MW of contracted IT capacity across two campuses.
Hut 8 is part of a wider group of public miners converting their sites into AI capacity. CleanSpark, which describes itself as a data center developer controlling more than 1.8 GW of power, land and data centers, is building its 175 MW Sandersville campus in Georgia for a Meta subsidiary and financing it with $2.276 billion of project-level secured notes. Both companies are betting that grid-connected sites, not mining machines, are their most valuable assets. Source: HUT Stock Powers Higher On $9.8B AI Data Center Deal And Bullish Wall Street Call (StocksToTrade), reporting Hut 8’s second Beacon Point lease, contracted capacity and Wells Fargo’s coverage initiation. Primary sources: CleanSpark 8-K filed 2026-09-18; CleanSpark, Inc. Announces Pricing of $2.276 Billion of Senior Secured Notes (Exhibit 99.1, 2026-09-18); CleanSpark 8-K filed 2026-09-17; Sandersville Investor Presentation, September 2026 (Exhibit 99.1, 2026-09-17); CleanSpark, Inc. Announces Proposed Offering of $2.227 Billion of Senior Secured Notes (Exhibit 99.2, 2026-09-17).Sources