Hut 8’s $9.8B Beacon Point Lease: The CRE Read on a Fully Leased AI Campus

On July 20, 2026, Hut 8 Corp. (NASDAQ: HUT, TSX: HUT) said it signed a second 15-year lease at its Beacon Point AI data center campus in Nueces County, Texas, covering 352 megawatts of IT capacity with a base-term contract value of $9.8 billion. The tenant is the same high-investment-grade company that signed the first Beacon Point lease, which the company does not name, and this second deal doubles that customer’s contracted capacity at the campus to 704 megawatts. The lease is triple-net and take-or-pay, with a 3.0 percent annual base-rent escalator, matching the structure of the first phase. Those are Hut 8’s figures, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission as an exhibit to a Form 8-K, not PSV findings.

With both phases signed, Hut 8 says the one-gigawatt Beacon Point campus is fully commercialized, bringing campus-level base-term contract value to $19.6 billion, which is the two $9.8 billion leases added together, and up to $50.2 billion if all renewal options are exercised. Across its AI data center portfolio, the company reports total contracted IT capacity of 949 megawatts, aggregate base-term contract value of $26.6 billion, and average annual net operating income of more than $1.75 billion. On power, Hut 8 says it has secured 1,000 megawatts of utility capacity for the campus through an interconnection agreement with AEP Texas, with initial energization targeted for the first quarter of 2027. The $9.8 billion base term spread across 352 megawatts and 15 years computes to roughly $1.86 million per contracted megawatt per year on average before the escalator is applied.

This is a leasing story, not a funding round. Hut 8 owns and builds the physical plant, the land, the substation, the interconnect, and the halls, and what it just did is fully lease a one-gigawatt campus to a single credit tenant before a watt is energized. The lease structure is the point: triple-net and take-or-pay means the tenant carries the operating costs and pays whether or not it draws the power, and a 15-year term with a 3.0 percent escalator gives the asset the long-duration, contracted cash flow profile of a credit-tenant net lease. A data center at this stage underwrites less like a speculative development and more like a single-tenant, investment-grade building, which is why the capital markets treated it as a de-risking event.

For an operator, that reframes what the scarce input actually is. The thing being leased here is not square footage, it is powered land delivered on a schedule: 1,000 megawatts of secured utility capacity and a 2027 energization date are doing more of the work than the building shell. It also concentrates the risk in one name. A campus that is 100 percent leased to a single unnamed tenant is only as strong as that counterparty’s credit and its appetite to actually draw the load, and take-or-pay protects the rent but ties the developer to one customer’s roadmap. Fully leased is not the same as fully de-risked when the lease is one signature deep.

Treat a disclosure like this as a trigger to build a lease-and-counterparty file from primary records: the Form 8-K and its press-release exhibit, Hut 8’s prior filings on the first Beacon Point lease and its financings, the campus’s local permits and the AEP Texas interconnection record as it appears, and the grid operator’s queue for the relevant load. An AI assistant reads each record and returns a cited memo: the base term, escalator, and renewal structure of each lease, how much capacity is contracted versus energized, what the take-or-pay and triple-net terms actually obligate, and what changed since the last check, with every figure traced to the document it came from.

The reviewer is the capital markets or acquisitions lead working with an analyst, and the approval gate is explicit: no land bid near a campus, no supply position, and no underwriting assumption moves on a model summary alone. The same review produces the questions a human sends: to AEP Texas and ERCOT on interconnection status and load timing for the specific site, to the county on permit and entitlement standing, and to counsel on how the take-or-pay and renewal terms allocate risk if the tenant’s draw slips behind the 2027 energization date. The tool assembles the record. It does not decide whether a single-tenant campus at these terms is exposure worth taking.

The judgment calls stay human. Whether a fully leased, single-tenant campus de-risks a specific land or supply position, how to weigh a developer whose contracted value concentrates in one unnamed counterparty, and whether take-or-pay rent against a not-yet-energized load belongs in a real estate underwrite are principal decisions, not summary outputs. So is the concentration question that runs through every data center brief on this desk: a platform whose contracted value sits with a handful of customers also carries those customers’ cycles.

The honest cautions. The $9.8 billion, the $19.6 billion campus value, the $26.6 billion portfolio figure, the $50.2 billion renewal case, and the more-than-$1.75 billion NOI are Hut 8’s own, filed with the SEC but forward-looking, and a base-term contract value is not realized rent. The tenant is unnamed, so the credit behind a fully leased campus is not public. PSV has not audited Hut 8’s leases or financing and states no view on the stock. The open questions worth tracking will land in filings and dockets, not the press cycle: whether the AEP Texas interconnection energizes on the 2027 schedule, what the take-or-pay and renewal terms actually require, and whether a campus that is fully leased today draws the load it contracted for. Verify at the substation, not the base term.