Bitcoin Magazine
Bitcoin Miner Hut 8 Shares Jump on $9.8 Billion AI Data Center Deal
Bitcoin miner Hut 8’s shares rose Monday after the Toronto Stock Exchange- and Nasdaq-listed firm said it had signed a second 15-year lease worth $9.8 billion for its AI data center.
Hut 8 shares peaked as high as $106 a pop before dropping to around $101. They closed Monday up over 10%.
The deal will see the Toronto-based firm’s Beacon Point campus in Texas data center cover 352 megawatts of IT capacity. The tenant using the data center’s will have its capacity doubled to 704 MW.
Hut 8 added that the campus has a base-term contract value of $19.6 billion over 15 years, rising to as much as $50.2 billion if renewal options are exercised.
Asher Genoot, CEO of Hut 8, said: “The real test of our power-first approach is what our partners are willing to commit against it. Our tenant at Beacon Point chose to double its footprint at the site, the strongest validation an asset can receive.”
Hut 8 last year signed a deal with American Data Centers Inc., a company backed by President Donald Trump’s sons Eric and Donald Jr., to contribute its Bitcoin mining equipment and help debut their American Bitcoin mining firm.
Hut 8 is one of a number of top publicly listed miners that have started directing resources to providing the infrastructure for high-powered computing.
The company in December secured a Google-backed partnership with Anthropic and Fluidstack to build up to 2.3 gigawatts of AI data center capacity in the U.S.
JUST IN: #Bitcoin mining company Hut 8 just announced it partnered with Google for financial backing on a 15-year lease.
— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) December 17, 2025
Bullish
A number of Bitcoin miners have already gone all-in on the industry as minting the biggest digital coin by market cap becomes harder and demand for AI compute surges.
As the price Bitcoin has dipped, it has become harder for Bitcoin miners to make ends meet.
Nasdaq-listed Bitfarms last year announced that it would wind down mining operations to focus on high-performance computing.
Instead of dropping mining operations completely, a number of Bitcoin miners have instead marketed themselves as “compute” or “digital infrastructure” companies while switching between minting digital coins and providing compute for AI — depending on which is more profitable.
Top miners Terawulf, IREN, and Cipher Mining all last year signed multi-year HPC contracts with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft.
Both the crypto mining and HPC industries require huge amounts of energy and data centers — but the move isn’t always easy: AI data centres require more expertise than Bitcoin mining.
This post Bitcoin Miner Hut 8 Shares Jump on $9.8 Billion AI Data Center Deal first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.
BitMine Immersion Technologies has added a major Ethereum position to its balance sheet, but the market reaction shows investors are not automatically rewarding every corporate crypto treasury move.
The company disclosed the purchase of 42,197 ETH, valued at roughly $73 million, in a July 16 SEC filing. The acquisition expands BitMine’s Ethereum treasury strategy at a time when public companies are still experimenting with how far they can push crypto exposure as part of corporate balance-sheet management.
The headline sounds bullish for Ethereum. A public company buying tens of thousands of ETH is not a small move. But BitMine’s stock slid in the following session, suggesting equity investors may be looking at the strategy with more caution than enthusiasm.
That contrast is the story. Crypto investors may see treasury accumulation as conviction. Stock investors may see concentration risk.
Reference: SEC
Corporate crypto treasury strategies are no longer limited to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin remains the cleanest and most established balance-sheet asset in the sector, largely because it is easier to explain as digital scarcity or a macro hedge. Ethereum is more complicated. ETH has a broader utility story, but that also means investors have to understand staking, smart contracts, DeFi, network fees, regulation, and ecosystem risk.
That makes BitMine’s move interesting.
A $73 million ETH purchase is not just a symbolic allocation. It is a serious commitment to Ethereum as a treasury asset. According to the available filing and market data, the filing details the acquisition of 42,197 ETH and places it inside a much larger Ethereum-focused balance sheet.
For crypto-native readers, that may look like an aggressive bet on Ethereum’s long-term role. For equity investors, it may raise a different question: is BitMine still being valued as an operating company, or is it becoming a leveraged public-market proxy for ETH?
That distinction is important because the stock market does not always treat crypto treasury exposure the way crypto traders expect.
When a company announces a large crypto purchase and the stock falls, the market is sending a message.
It does not necessarily mean investors think Ethereum is weak. It may mean they are unsure whether the company’s treasury strategy improves shareholder value. Public-market investors care about dilution, financing terms, execution risk, custody, accounting treatment, and whether management is using capital efficiently.
If a company’s core business is already tied to crypto, adding more ETH can intensify the same risk rather than diversify it.
That is why BitMine’s stock move matters. It suggests the equity market may be less impressed by headline accumulation than the crypto market might be. Investors could be asking whether the company has enough operating strength to support the strategy, or whether the stock is now mostly a bet on ETH price performance.
This is the challenge every public crypto treasury company faces.
A rising crypto market can make the strategy look brilliant. A drawdown can make it look reckless. The difference often depends on timing, leverage, investor expectations, and whether the company can explain why holding the asset strengthens the business.
For Ethereum itself, corporate buying remains a constructive signal.
The more entities that treat ETH as a treasury asset, the stronger the argument that Ethereum is maturing beyond a trading token. ETFs, staking infrastructure, tokenization, and DeFi already support the institutional case. Treasury accumulation adds another layer.
But the BitMine reaction also shows that Ethereum treasury demand is not a one-way narrative.
Investors may support ETH exposure in some structures and reject it in others. A spot ETF may be easier for institutions to understand than a company stock with operational risks attached. A clean fund product may be preferable to a public miner or infrastructure company using its balance sheet to accumulate tokens.
That does not make BitMine’s strategy wrong. It simply means the market will judge it through more than the ETH price.
The next thing to watch is whether BitMine can show a clear reason for holding such a large Ethereum treasury. If the strategy is backed by a coherent capital plan, custody framework, and operating model, investors may become more comfortable. If it looks like a pure price bet, the stock may remain volatile.
For crypto markets, the purchase still matters. It is another example of ETH moving into corporate treasury discussions. For equity markets, the message is more cautious: buying Ethereum is not enough by itself. Public companies still have to prove the allocation makes sense for shareholders.
This article is based on BitMine’s SEC filing and BMNR market data.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
This report is based on information released by SEC. at SEC
Bitcoin Magazine
Ocean Mining VP Jason Hughes: BIP-110 on Track to Fail as Miner Signaling Stays Below 1%
This is a guest post by Jason Hughes, VP of Development and Engineering at Ocean Mining. Opinions expressed are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine. The article originally appeared on X.com and has been published with the permission of the author.
Let me start off by saying I’m not pro BIP110, and I’m not anti-BIP110. If it actually succeeds as something that gains true consensus within the network and ends up being enforced by a majority of the network… cool. If so, then we’ll go with it because the network has spoken and accepted it, and all nodes, including non-BIP110 nodes, will be pulled along for the ride. Unfortunately for proponents of the proposal, that simply isn’t currently the case by any measurable metric, nor does it appear to have a trajectory suggesting that will change, either.
There’s been a lot of misleading information about this whole thing, especially in the context of mining. A few quick key bullet points to briefly counter some hyperbole from proponents: BIP110 is NOT inevitable. It CAN fail. BIP110 can and will cause a chain split/fork in a minority hashrate situation. BIP110 is NOT without risk to miners choosing to adopt it. Miners not supporting BIP110 are not suddenly mining “invalid” blocks just because a proposal that isn’t yet adopted simply exists. You’re not a bad person or evil simply because you don’t like or support BIP110. (The fact that I feel the need to point out that last part is actually kind of sad…)
I was going to write a long post to help keep miners informed about things they need to remain aware of as this all plays out… before realizing I already did so months ago, as a document I authored that I had hoped could be put out as a miner education piece at OCEAN. Sadly, it never got published. So I went ahead and updated it, and well, here it is.
Again, keep in mind this was written months ago, intended to be as agnostic as possible in an effort to make it acceptable as a corporate post. That effort failed, so I’m posting it as a personal document today instead. As a miner making important decisions about your operations, you need to be aware of all of this without the sugarcoating and, frankly, outright misleading information coming from some of the BIP110 proponents. You must be vigilant and decide what’s right for you.
While there is certainly some misleading information from the opposition as well, nothing I’ve seen is nearly as egregious as the extremely premature claims of victory and accompanying hyperbole pushed by the BIP110 side. Summarizing my doc a bit, my personal suggestion to miners is this: Signal if you support BIP110. Do not signal if you don’t support BIP110 or don’t care. Either way, monitor the network on/around/before block 961632.
If you continue to see non-signaling blocks from major pools, you can be reasonably certain they’re not going to suddenly decide later to throw away millions of dollars’ worth of revenue to backtrack and signal for BIP110. If they do, by some chance, start to signal for BIP110, you should monitor that and consider switching as required to stay on the heaviest chain. The key point is that, realistically, only one side can win. It’s either BIP110 succeeds, and miners not on the BIP110 side fail, or BIP110 fails, and miners on the non-BIP110 side succeed.
Moving on, let’s dive into a small fraction of my rationale.
Depending on which centralized crawler you look at… no way to know for sure [how many BIP110 nodes are signaling support]. My personal private crawler puts this number much lower, but that’s a discussion for another day. Suffice it to say, I think it’s logical and correct to say that even 15% is not a majority.
Yep, because many miners, merchants, users, etc., all actually wanted Segwit. There was tremendous economic and community weight behind it. Without rehashing that whole thing, as plenty of resources on the topic from before BIP110 are worth a read, suffice it to say that BIP110 and Segwit activations are not quite comparable, as many have already pointed out. Segwit, for example, went into its UASF territory with around 1/3rd of the network’s hashrate already signaling support. With that kind of backing, the UASF to help push the MASF over the tipping point made a lot of sense. It doesn’t make sense here for BIP110.
[0.6% is a] pretty stark contrast to even Segwit’s low baseline support. Yes, I know it’s increased slightly in the past couple of weeks, but no new entrants. Just more clearly rented hashrate from one of the same small proponents.
Something to keep in mind is that mining BIP110 signaling blocks via DATUM on OCEAN carries virtually no risk to the miner up until the fork point at block 961632. The cost is negligible, as you’re effectively guaranteed to recoup rental costs, etc.
It’s awesome that the ability to do so exists, and I wouldn’t have it any other way… but just something to keep in mind when weighing signaling from such blocks in the grand scheme of things from a risk-reward, money-on-the-table perspective.
I also see no evidence to suggest that this could be the case. Subjectively, I disagree with the premise, as it’s not in a mining pool’s best interest to destabilize the network in such a way. Part of the reason for early signaling and lock-in periods is to help coordinate upgrades in a smooth fashion. Waiting until the last minute negates that benefit entirely. I see no compelling rationale or upside to doing so.
Continuing on this, as part of my personal node monitoring setup, I specifically monitor nodes known to belong to various entities, such as other mining pools, exchanges, large lightning nodes, merchants, etc. A supermajority of which are monitored with explicit permission and confirmation/coordination.
Expanding on that, most [mining pools] have updated their nodes since the proliferation of BIP110’s release, even since the release of Knots 29.3. Additionally, it is known that many mining pools run modified versions of their node software to facilitate various requirements of their specific infrastructure. Such changes would need to be ported to a BIP110-compatible client, tested, evaluated, and deployed ahead of time. I currently see no evidence that this is the case currently.
As far as I can tell, the pools are aware but ignoring.
This is one of the funniest and most ridiculous arguments I’ve heard from the pro-BIP110 crowd. Comparing a consensus change that can be unilaterally enforced upon the network by miners and accepted by 100% of existing nodes (a soft fork), with a hard fork which no existing node will accept… is disingenuous at best. T
ightening rules (like BIP110): Soft fork, can be enforced by miners if they choose to do so. Loosening rules (like canceling a halving): Hard fork, can not be enforced by miners without effectively 100% buy-in from the entire network… which isn’t likely to happen. Comparing the two is, bluntly, just stupid.
This would be true of a consensus change that has, well, consensus. While BIP110 has made a valiant effort to gain that consensus, it has yet to have any measurable majority at what is now arguably the 11th hour. Not in nodes, not in hashrate, not in the social layers (consensus.health has a cool visual there where you’ll find me in the middle).
If somehow BIP110 gains 51%+ of the network hashrate on/before block 961632… then, alright. It’s enforced, since as a soft fork a majority of miners can unilaterally enforce it in the absence of a fully adopted URSF (effectively a misnomer, as this would kind of be a hard fork).
Firstly… no I don’t, even though I have. Second, it’s a rushed proposal that never had the time to even try and gain real consensus. It’s been 7 months since the release of the first BIP110 client. There’s ~3 weeks to go before “mandatory” signaling starts as of now (less by the time you read this). 90% of the time available has passed with no change in overall sentiment from any relevant players. If it hasn’t gained sufficient adoption in the past 7 months, it’s not likely to do so in the next 3 weeks.
I’ll be the first to say, even I personally overstated the risk here early on when Core proposed its OP_RETURN change. I personally expected something particularly egregious to hit the chain almost immediately, and to the best of my knowledge, that’s not yet happened. Could it still happen? Yeah, I suppose.
But considering from a technical perspective, byte-for-byte the same contiguous arbitrary data can provably end up stored in the current chain or the BIP-110 chain without much issue… this particular argument for BIP-110 falls pretty flat to me at this point.
Do I want CSAM in the chain? Of course not. Am I a pedophile if I don’t support BIP110? Also not.
I could continue to go on and on and on, but I’ll stop here. I’ve wasted enough time on this. I’m sure I’ve done plenty to annoy both sides of the BIP110 debate at this point, as I don’t adopt either stance. I’m sure I’ll catch flak from all angles simply for daring to speak my mind on it.
Overall, I mostly think it was silly to approach addressing a real problem (the OP_RETURN default change in Bitcoin Core) with the maximum anti-spam manifesto based soft fork proposal… which provably cannot stop spam, arbitrary data, etc. (Yes, I know, proponents will claim it’s not about spam… and will also make semantic arguments that it does stop data as well… neither of which appears to be correct.)
I’ll close with the concession that I could be wrong. I’m not Nostradamus, and I can’t accurately predict the outcome with 100% certainty. I can only go by what the data tells me, and so I give BIP110’s success less than a 5% chance of actually succeeding… and I consider that generous. You can take my opinions on this however you wish, but I highly recommend you don’t discount the actual data points, remain vigilant, and do what’s best for you and your mining revenue. Don’t be gaslit by either side of the debate, and make your own decisions.
Here’s a link to the same document linked above for ease of access.
This post Ocean Mining VP Jason Hughes: BIP-110 on Track to Fail as Miner Signaling Stays Below 1% first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Jason Hughes.
Bitcoin Magazine
Keel Infrastructure to Consolidate Three Bitcoin Sites Into One AI Campus
Keel Infrastructure Corp. has secured a set of approvals that push its data center project in Sherbrooke, Québec, toward construction.
The City of Sherbrooke cleared the North American digital infrastructure and energy company to enter into an agreement with Hydro-Sherbrooke for the transfer and operation of 96 megawatts of existing capacity, along with a purchase agreement for the land where the campus will rise.
The power agreement lets Keel consolidate three of its current Bitcoin mining sites in the province into a single 96 MW campus. The company did not request additional power, a choice that preserves the use of current electrical infrastructure and keeps the project in step with Québec’s energy priorities.
Keel won approval to recategorize the 96 MW from Bitcoin mining to high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, the workload class that draws capital across the sector.
That pivot mirrors a broad shift. Public miners across the industry have moved to repurpose energized sites for compute, a trend visible in deals such as CleanSpark’s $6.6 billion data center lease and the company’s own decision to exit Bitcoin mining in favor of AI.
Investors reward operators that control power and built-out sites, though the transition carries risk. VanEck has warned that miners chasing AI infrastructure confront a $50 billion funding gap as capital flows to firms with capacity in hand.
The Sherbrooke footprint traces back to the company’s construction of mining farms in the city, which drew on the province’s low-cost hydro power. Keel will fold that base into one campus rather than build fresh demand into the grid.
Two conditions remain. Transfer of the energy capacity to the new site requires review and approval from Québec’s Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Energy. The land purchase, for a parcel about 100 miles east of Montréal, is subject to customary conditions that include site inspections, feasibility analysis, and municipal approvals. Keel expects that transaction to close in the first quarter of 2027.
“These developments represent an important step forward in the development of our Sherbrooke project, which will be one of the largest data center projects in Québec,” said Philippe Fortier, Executive Vice President, Corporate Development at Keel. “The City’s approval of these agreements reflects the strength of the project and our commitment to the Sherbrooke community.”
Fortier added that the company has operated in Québec since its inception and views the project as a long-term commitment to the local and provincial economies. Keel aims to build the campus on a lasting relationship with its host community.
This post Keel Infrastructure to Consolidate Three Bitcoin Sites Into One AI Campus first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.
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