Hut 8 announced that it is building an artificial-intelligence (AI) data center in Louisiana for Anthropic and has signed a $7 billion lease with Fluidstack, backed by Google.
- HUT’s lease agreement with Fluidstack is for 245 megawatts (MW) of IT capacity at the River Bend campus in Louisiana.
- It also grants Fluidstack a Right of First Offer (ROFO) for up to an additional 1,000 MW of IT capacity.
- Apart from Google, the deal also ropes in Entergy, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Jacobs, and Vertiv in institutional-grade execution models.
Shares of Hut 8 Corp. (HUT) rallied over 24% in Wednesday’s premarket trade after the energy infrastructure company announced that it is building an artificial-intelligence (AI) data center in Louisiana for Anthropic.
In a statement, the company said it has signed a 15-year lease agreement valued at $7 billion with Fluidstack at its River Bend campus. Google (GOOG) is providing a financial backstop covering the obligations for the base lease term.
In a separate statement, the company announced its deal with Anthropic to develop and deliver AI data center infrastructure leveraging Fluidstack’s high-performance clusters.
Deal Details
HUT’s lease agreement with Fluidstack is for 245 megawatts (MW) of IT capacity at the River Bend data center campus in Louisiana. Also, it grants Fluidstack a Right of First Offer (ROFO) for up to an additional 1,000 MW of IT capacity.
The deal marks the start of HUT’s AI data center partnership with Anthropic, in which HUT will develop and deliver the power needed to run the facilities, while Fluidstack will operate the high-performance clusters.
Apart from Google, the deal also ropes in Entergy for utility capacity, J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs for financing, and Jacobs and Vertiv for engineering and infrastructure.
The company expects the deal to generate a cumulative net operating income (NOI) of $6.9 billion over the base term, averaging to about $454 million NOI annually. The deal also features three 5-year renewal options that could increase the contract value to about $17.7 billion. The initial data hall at River Bend is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2027, with additional halls scheduled to be completed throughout the year.
How Did Stocktwits Users React?
On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment around HUT jumped to ‘ bullish’ from ‘bearish’ levels a day ago, and message volume jumped to ‘high’ from ‘normal’ levels. The stock was trending at number three on the platform at the time of writing.
Shares of HUT are up over 68% in the past year.
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