Shares of U.S. mining company Hut 8 rose by 25% after it announced a deal with Anthropic and Fluidstack in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and signed a $7 billion data center lease agreement, reports The Block. The market reaction reflects a growing trend of miners transitioning from exclusively mining cryptocurrencies to supporting AI computations.
Anthropic is a technology company in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), the creator of the AI chatbot Claude. Fluidstack is a cloud platform for high-performance computing. Hut 8, also known as the operator of the American Bitcoin mining infrastructure linked to the Trump family, announced that it will develop data center infrastructure for Anthropic as part of a partnership with Fluidstack.
At the River Bend campus in Louisiana, Hut 8 will create a 245 MW data center for Anthropic, using high-performance computing clusters managed by Fluidstack. The plan is to later increase the capacity to 2295 MW.
With financial support from Google, Hut 8 signed a 15-year lease agreement for the initial 245 MW of capacity with Fluidstack, worth $7 billion. Google will cover the lease payments, and the miner plans to take out a loan from JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs to build the data centers, which are scheduled to launch in 2027.
Following this news, Hut 8's shares rose more than 25%, trading at $46.24. In pre-market trading on December 18, they were trading around $40.8, according to TradingView. The growth over the past month is 12%.
As AI infrastructure becomes an increasingly attractive business direction for miners, the risk is growing that companies will gradually divert resources away from Bitcoin mining towards it, according to The Block's forecasts for the cryptocurrency industry for 2026. It is noted that this trend could potentially reduce the computational power of the Bitcoin network and weaken its security over time. The Bitcoin community will still need to create an ecosystem that increases demand for network usage, the report's authors believe.
In December, activity on the Bitcoin network fell to yearly lows. Transaction fees, which form part of miners' revenue, fell by 87% over the year—from $3.7 to $0.48. Industry participants say the traditional Bitcoin mining model will become unprofitable in the coming years if miners do not switch to self-generation, expand their business into other areas, or if Bitcoin does not appreciate by at least 50% per year.
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