TL;DR · 30-second read
The Short Version
Hut 8, a company that mines bitcoin and builds computer centers, won a bankruptcy auction for two Texas computer sites with a $140 million offer. A judge still has to approve the sale on September 29.
The prize is the electricity. Power-ready space at crypto miners has been valued at less than one-ninth of what similar space fetches once an artificial intelligence company rents it. Buying sites that already exist can mean skipping a crowded line to connect to the Texas grid.
The catch: Hut 8 has not said how much power the sites have, and the Texas governor just ordered a pause on permits for these facilities.
Hut 8 has won the bankruptcy auction for Poolin’s two Texas data centers, the Pyote and Tarbush sites, with a $140 million bid, Bitbo reported on September 24, 2026, citing court records. The sale still requires approval from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey, which has scheduled a hearing for September 29.
The sites would add to the roughly 1.5 gigawatts of power capacity Hut 8 already controls in Texas across operating and development-stage sites. The result arrives days after Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to halt data-center permits until ERCOT, the state’s main grid operator, completes an audit.
Executive Summary
Hut 8 placed the winning $140 million bid for two Texas data centers being sold out of Poolin’s bankruptcy. If the court approves the sale on September 29, the Pyote and Tarbush sites join a Texas portfolio of about 1.5 gigawatts that Hut 8 already has operating or in development.
The deal matters because grid access has become one of the scarcest inputs for both AI data centers and bitcoin mining in Texas. Data centers now account for 87% of ERCOT’s large-load queue, which totals 410 gigawatts, according to CoinShares. An existing site whose power arrangements come with it is a way to acquire capacity without starting at the back of that line.
Whether $140 million is cheap or expensive cannot yet be judged. Data-center capacity is priced per megawatt, and the megawatt capacity of Pyote and Tarbush has not been disclosed. The purchase also lands just as Texas has paused data-center permitting, which could either raise the value of sites that already hold permits or slow any plan to convert them.
The $3M-to-$27M Megawatt Gap Behind the Bid
Data-center capacity is priced per megawatt, meaning the amount of electrical power a site can deliver to the computers inside it. Two recent market marks bracket what sites like Pyote and Tarbush could be worth. At the low end, the energized but unleased capacity of some listed bitcoin miners is valued at less than $3 million per megawatt. At the high end, three fully leased AI facilities in Northern Virginia recently sold for about $27 million per megawatt. Between those two marks sits the cost of moving from one to the other: converting a mining site to AI-grade infrastructure runs roughly $8 million to $15 million per megawatt.
Stacking those figures shows where the value is. Power at the miner mark plus conversion comes to about $11 million to $18 million per megawatt, against a $27 million mark for leased AI capacity. The residual, roughly $9 million to $16 million per megawatt on these numbers, is what a buyer captures only if it converts the site and signs a tenant. The comparison is directional rather than precise. Northern Virginia is a more mature data-center market, the Virginia sales were of finished and leased buildings, and Texas sites differ in power, land and permitting.
Where the $140 million lands on that ladder depends on a figure that has not been published: the sites’ capacity. The arithmetic is simple. If Pyote and Tarbush together carry more than about 47 megawatts, Hut 8 bid less per megawatt than the sub-$3 million mark for miner capacity. If they carry less, the bid priced in a premium to that mark, effectively paying in advance for part of the conversion upside. In either case, the auction tests how much buyers will pay for a position on the gap before any tenant exists.
Buying Around a 410-Gigawatt Queue
ERCOT’s large-load queue is the line of big electricity customers asking to connect to the Texas grid. CoinShares puts its total at 410 gigawatts, with data centers making up 87% of it. A gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts. A new project joins that line and waits for grid studies and upgrades before it can draw power. An existing data center lets a buyer start further up the line, provided its grid connection and power agreements survive the change of ownership. That is the core case for buying distressed sites: the asset is the interconnection as much as the buildings.
Governor Abbott’s September 21 directive to halt data-center permits until ERCOT completes an audit, alongside reviews of grid and water impacts, cuts both ways for this deal. If the pause applies only to new applications, sites that already hold their permits become scarcer relative to demand, which strengthens the case for buying over building. If expanding or converting an existing facility requires new or amended permits, the pause could reach Pyote and Tarbush too and delay any AI conversion until the audit concludes.
On August 10, Hut 8 said it welcomed state scrutiny focused on grid reliability, local resources and community impacts. That statement predates the permit pause. How the company paces its Texas expansion against the audit is now an operational question as well as a policy one.
A Small Check Against a Large Book
For Hut 8, $140 million is modest. In the second quarter the company reported 949 megawatts of contracted IT capacity, worth an estimated $26.6 billion in base-term contracts, and said it had secured $7.5 billion in investment-grade financing so far. The bid equals less than 2% of that financing. For a developer at this scale, the binding constraint looks less like capital and more like power that can be connected and permitted, which is what a bankruptcy auction can offer.
CoinShares estimates AI work can earn about $1.5 million in annual profit per megawatt, compared with $0.5 million for bitcoin mining. That tripling explains the pull toward conversion. On the same figures, though, the extra $1 million per megawatt a year takes roughly 8 to 15 years to repay an $8 million to $15 million conversion, before financing costs. The economics therefore rest on long, contracted leases, which is why a leased Virginia megawatt trades at many times an unleased one and why Hut 8 reports contracted capacity and contract value rather than raw megawatts alone.
Mining Distress Is Supplying the Sites
The second quarter was hard on miners. Bitcoin ended June at $58,400, while listed miners faced a weighted-average cash cost of about $75,500 per coin, which left the sector below breakeven overall. Conditions improved by mid-August as bitcoin recovered and a stronger hash price, the expected revenue per unit of computing power, pushed most operators back above cash breakeven. Stretches like that test weaker balance sheets, and assets that change hands through court processes are one result.
The likely beneficiaries are creditors and estates selling energized sites, because the pool of bidders now includes developers who value power for AI, not only for mining. Listed miners whose capacity carries sub-$3 million marks could see those marks revisited if more auctions clear at higher per-megawatt prices. One auction is a single data point, though. The September 29 hearing, and any disclosure of the sites’ capacity, will say more about the market than the headline price does.
Background
Hut 8 is a publicly traded company (Nasdaq: HUT) that began in bitcoin mining and has built a large data-center business alongside it, reporting 949 megawatts of contracted IT capacity in the second quarter and about 1.5 gigawatts of operating or development-stage power capacity in Texas. Poolin is best known in bitcoin mining as a mining-pool operator. Its two Texas data centers, Pyote and Tarbush, are being sold through a bankruptcy proceeding in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey.
Texas has become a center of both bitcoin mining and AI data-center development because of its large, largely self-contained grid run by ERCOT. Demand to connect has surged, with data centers making up most of ERCOT’s large-load queue. That has made sites with existing power connections valuable and drawn closer scrutiny from state officials over grid reliability and water use. Source: Hut 8 Wins Poolin’s Texas Data Centers With $140M Bid (Bitbo), on Hut 8’s winning bankruptcy-auction bid for Poolin’s Pyote and Tarbush sites and the Texas market context around it.Sources