Hut 8 disclosed a landmark 15-year lease for 245 MW of AI data-center capacity at River Bend, Louisiana, with Google providing a financial backstop for base-term payments.

The deal signals a broader shift of crypto miners into AI infrastructure, with players like Core Scientific, Galaxy Digital, and Cipher Mining pursuing similar arrangements.

The base-term value is $7.0 billion, potentially rising to about $17.7 billion if renewal options are exercised, and it includes a Right of First Offer for up to 1,000 MW of additional capacity.

Fluidstack will manage the high-performance computing clusters for Anthropic, enabling Claude AI models to utilize the infrastructure.

Officials describe the project as a path to high-wage jobs and long-term tech careers, while acknowledging ongoing development and release updates.

Analysts present a bullish yet varied outlook on the stock, with price targets ranging from the high $40s to near $80, reflecting the high-variance AI-infrastructure thesis with crypto roots.

The River Bend facility is designed to support high-performance computing and AI workloads, including large-scale training and inference tasks.

Anthropic’s role as a major AI model developer anchors immediate demand for the facility, validating Hut 8’s pivot to AI compute capacity.

Leadership emphasizes a power-first approach, integrating power sourcing, data-center design, and compute deployment to scale to gigawatt-level operations.

The deal underscores urgency among cloud providers to secure power-intensive AI infrastructure as Nvidia GPUs and other hardware drive demand.

Analysts view the arrangement as a strong AI/HPC colocation opportunity with improving economics for AI power infrastructure.

The press release notes forward-looking statements and non-GAAP NOI measures, signaling caution about projections.