Investment bank Benchmark has raised its price target on Bitcoin mining firm Hut 8 after the company announced it had signed a second 15-year lease worth $9.8 billion for its AI data center operations.

In a research note issued Wednesday, Benchmark equity research analyst Mark Palmer reiterated his "buy" rating on Hut 8, which is listed on both the Toronto Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. Palmer raised the price target to $195, up from $165, representing an approximately 80% upside from the company's then-current share price of nearly $110.

Palmer argued that the lease agreement validates Hut 8's "power-first" approach to developing AI infrastructure — a strategy that has become a competitive differentiator as power availability emerges as a binding constraint on data center expansion, with grid connection timelines for new projects routinely stretching multiple years.

Hut 8 announced on Monday that it had secured a second 15-year lease covering 352 megawatts of IT capacity at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas. The agreement doubles the site's contracted capacity to 704 MW and fully commercializes the campus, which has access to 1,000 MW of utility capacity. Following the announcement, Hut 8 shares climbed more than 10%, closing near $101 after reaching an intraday peak above $106.

Palmer estimates that the new Beacon Point lease alone could generate approximately $655 million in annual net operating income once stabilized. If renewal options are exercised, the campus's total contract value could reach as high as $50.2 billion.

Hut 8 joins a growing roster of publicly traded Bitcoin miners that are pivoting toward AI and high-performance computing amid tightening mining margins driven by a declining Bitcoin price and increasing network difficulty. The strategic appeal is structural: miners already control large-scale power infrastructure and possess operational expertise in managing intensive, around-the-clock energy loads — assets that are scarce and increasingly valuable to hyperscale AI customers. In December, the company struck a Google-backed agreement with Anthropic and Fluidstack to develop up to 2.3 gigawatts of AI data center capacity in the United States.

Hut 8's Mining Ventures

Competitors including Terawulf, IREN, and Cipher Mining have signed comparable multi-year HPC contracts with Google and Microsoft. Meanwhile, Bitfarms announced last year that it would wind down its mining operations entirely to focus on high-performance computing.

Hut 8 has taken a different path, maintaining its mining operations through a majority stake in American Bitcoin, a mining venture backed by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr.

Hut 8 is scheduled to report its second-quarter earnings on August 4.