Nvidia is the previously unnamed tenant behind Hut 8 Corp.’s fully leased, 1-gigawatt Beacon Point AI data center campus in Nueces County, Texas, the Financial Times reported Tuesday, citing five people familiar with the matter. The disclosure puts a name to a lease that Hut 8 had described only as belonging to a high-investment-grade counterparty, and reveals that the deal’s value could roughly triple if renewal options are exercised.
Hut 8, a Nasdaq- and Toronto Stock Exchange-listed data center and bitcoin mining company, announced July 26 that the same tenant behind Beacon Point’s first lease had signed for a second 352-megawatt block of IT capacity, bringing the campus to 704 megawatts of contracted capacity out of 1,000 megawatts of utility power arranged with AEP Texas. The two leases together carry a base-term value of $19.6 billion over 15 years, with rent escalating 3% annually.
“The real test of our power-first approach is what our partners are willing to commit against it,” Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot said in the July 26 release announcing the second lease.
The Financial Times reports that if all three five-year renewal options embedded in the leases are exercised, the campus’s total contract value could reach $50.2 billion. The newspaper’s sources say Nvidia intends to use the site for large-scale AI training and operations, and that the chipmaker could also sublease capacity to “neocloud” operators β companies that buy Nvidia GPUs in bulk and resell AI computing capacity to other businesses.
Nvidia did not confirm or deny the report. In a statement, the company said it “is working with ecosystem partners to accelerate the deployment of efficient AI infrastructure through the DSX AI factory architecture,” a reference to Nvidia’s full-stack blueprint for gigawatt-scale AI data centers that integrates its own chips and networking gear with partners’ buildings and power. Hut 8 has said Beacon Point was designed around the DSX reference architecture. Neither company’s statement independently verifies the FT’s tenant identification; RealtyWire is attributing that detail to the Financial Times’ reporting, consistent with the outlet’s track record on data center financing stories.
The arrangement gives Nvidia a direct real estate and power footprint distinct from its role as an equipment supplier. Nvidia has increasingly attached its name and balance sheet to the physical infrastructure that runs on its chips: the company is reportedly in talks to backstop up to $250 billion of OpenAI’s leasing costs at a planned Ohio campus, and last week signed a non-binding letter of intent with South Korea’s SK Group for a 2-gigawatt AI data center built on Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform. Financial terms and structures vary across the three deals, and they involve different counterparties and roles for Nvidia, but together they show the chipmaker moving well beyond selling silicon into financing, leasing and potentially operating the buildings that house it.
Hut 8’s Beacon Point campus sits among a cluster of large data center projects racing to come online across Texas, drawn by cheap land and available power capacity. CoreWeave’s Helios campus in Dickens County, roughly 350 miles northwest, and the Alpha Digital Campus planned for Reeves County are separate projects from separate developers, underscoring how many gigawatt-scale AI facilities are now under development in the state simultaneously.
What it means: The verified facts are Hut 8’s own: a fully contracted 1-gigawatt campus, a $19.6 billion base-term value, and a tenant Hut 8 has consistently declined to name. The Nvidia identification and the $50.2 billion renewal-inclusive figure are attributed to Financial Times reporting, not confirmed by either company, and should be read with that caveat. What to watch: whether Hut 8 or Nvidia addresses the report on an upcoming earnings call, and whether any sublease-to-neocloud arrangement surfaces in SEC filings from Nvidia’s known cloud-computing partners.
