Hut 8 signed a second 15-year lease at its Beacon Point AI data center campus in Nueces County, Texas on July 20: another 352 megawatts of IT capacity worth $9.8 billion in base contract value, with a 3 percent annual escalator. The tenant, an unnamed investment-grade customer, doubled its footprint to 704 megawatts, and the deal fully commercializes the campus against its 1 gigawatt of secured utility interconnection with AEP Texas.
Campus-level contract value now totals $19.6 billion over 15 years, and up to roughly $50 billion if renewal options are exercised, per contemporaneous reporting. A former bitcoin miner just fully leased a gigawatt of AI capacity to a single tenant it will not name.
Why the structure matters
This is a landlord deal, not a cloud deal. Hut 8 develops the site, secures the power, and collects contracted rent for 15 years; the tenant brings its own compute. The template is the same one behind TeraWulf’s $19 billion, 20-year Anthropic lease in Kentucky: miners hold the two assets AI cannot wait for, grid interconnection and energized land, and long-dated leases to investment-grade tenants convert those assets into bond-like cash flows. Contrast that with Empery Digital selling bitcoin at a loss to fund its pivot: the miners who secured power early get rent; the ones who did not are selling coins.
The signal
Fifteen-year commitments at this scale are the strongest form of demand evidence there is, stronger than capex guidance or funding rounds, because a tenant only signs one if it expects to need the power in 2041. Beacon Point joins Hyperion’s $50 billion repricing and the broader pattern in our data center boom explainer: the constraint is energized capacity, and whoever holds it is setting terms. The tenant’s anonymity is itself a tell. In a market this tight, even the identity of who locked up a gigawatt is competitive information.
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