Hut 8 Closes Second Lease of $9.8 Billion in Texas, Turns Beacon Point into Showcase for AI CapEx
15-year contract with the same investment-grade client doubles footprint to 704 MW and brings the campus's contracted value to $19.6 billion, $50.2 billion with renewals.
Hut 8, the former bitcoin miner that has repositioned itself as an AI data center operator, announced on Monday, July 20, a second lease of $9.8 billion at the Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas. The 15-year contract covers 352 MW of IT capacity and brings the investment-grade client, whose identity Hut 8 keeps confidential, to 704 MW contracted on site. This is the second time the same tenant has doubled its footprint in less than a year.
Combined, the two leases bring the campus to a total of $19.6 billion in base contract value. If the client exercises all renewal options, the campus's long-term gross revenue could reach $50.2 billion, according to the company’s official statement. Hut shares rose by up to 17% in Monday's trading, and the compute infrastructure sector benefited as well.
Inside the Contract
The tenant, described only as investment-grade, decided to double its size on site after the first data center entered the commissioning phase. Hut 8 will build the second facility based on NVIDIA DSX architecture, Nvidia’s reference for next-generation clusters connected in a rail-optimized topology. A utility capacity of 1,000 MW has already been secured with AEP Texas, alleviating the CIO of the tenant's typical anxiety in such contracts: many rival projects in Virginia and Ohio are stalled exactly at the utility's queue.
Asher Genoot, CEO of Hut 8, summarized the deal in a statement: "The true test of our power-first approach is what our partners are willing to sign on it. Our tenant at Beacon Point chose to double their footprint on site, the strongest validation an asset can receive." In the consolidated portfolio, Hut 8's contracted capacity reaches 949 MW, supported by 1,330 MW of utility availability, giving the company a rare reserve of land and energy in the current market.
Context: A Bottleneck Issue
The supercycle is known by the numbers. Amazon has scheduled approximately $200 billion of CapEx for 2026, Alphabet between $175 billion and $185 billion, Meta between $115 billion and $135 billion, and Microsoft is closing the fiscal year with a run rate near $145 billion, according to the latest quarterly guidance. Citigroup revised its estimate for global AI spending between 2026 and 2030 to $8.9 trillion, up from the previous estimate of $8 trillion. The bottleneck is no longer GPU acquisition, but energy, land, and zoning.
Caution is evident in the current account. Ted Pick, CEO of Morgan Stanley, stated in the 2Q26 call that the AI CapEx cycle is only "10% to 15% complete." David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, referred to the moment as a "supercycle of CapEx." Morgan Stanley Research predicts that 80% of the estimated $3 trillion in AI CapEx by 2028 has yet to be disbursed. No one on Wall Street is pricing this allocation to return to shareholders via increased EPS before 2028, and the market is grappling with an uncomfortable trade-off between short-term depreciation and long-term revenue.
Where the Effect Hits
The compute boom operates in two geographies with distinct dynamics.
In Texas, the effect is political and physical. West Texas currently has dozens of GW of projects under environmental review, and the pressure on the ERCOT grid is already triggering hearings in the state legislature. The next governor will inherit a dossier of conflict between residential and industrial interests in areas that were previously rural, such as Culberson and Reeves County, where the industrial rate is around $0.08 per kWh, one of the lowest in the country.
In Brazil, the same boom reverberates through a different channel. Announcements of intentions for data centers have surpassed $22 billion in 2026, involving projects from TikTok, Elea Digital, Odata, Ascenty, and Casa dos Ventos, distributed across São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul, and Ceará. The bottleneck remains the same as in Texas: substations, transmission, and environmental licensing. The Beacon Point contract becomes a reference benchmark for cost negotiations per MW in Brazil, where the average industrial tariff is around R$ 0.52 per kWh, about five times the amount paid in West Texas when converted to dollars.
A note that rarely enters sell-side analysis: the base contract of Hut 8 embedded in this $9.8 billion includes pass-through energy tariff. The final amount that the hyperscaler pays in electricity bills over the 15 years could double the reported commitment. This makes a difference when an infrastructure buyer compares cap rates between American and Latin American projects.