Hut 8 signed a second 15-year lease worth $9.8 billion at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas, according to Reuters's coverage of the deal. The new lease covers 352 megawatts of IT capacity, matching the size of the first lease Hut 8 signed at the same site about two and a half months earlier, and it goes to the same undisclosed, high investment-grade tenant. Same tenant, doubled footprint. That customer's contracted load at Beacon Point now stands at 704 megawatts, and the campus's base-term contract value has climbed to $19.6 billion, with renewal options that could push it as high as $50.2 billion.
Hut 8 originally scoped the first Beacon Point data hall for 224 megawatts of IT capacity. NVIDIA's DSX reference architecture for gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure advanced faster than that design assumed, pushing rack-level power density higher, so Hut 8 redesigned the hall to hold 352 megawatts, a 57 percent increase, on the same acreage and the same utility interconnection with AEP Texas, the utility now backed by a $3.26 billion federal loan for exactly this kind of grid buildout. Every added megawatt of IT load is added heat that has to leave the building. Beacon Point took on 128 more megawatts of that heat without adding a single acre, which means Hut 8 solved the jump on the cooling side, inside the data hall itself.
Cooling at Beacon Point runs on a closed-loop water system filled once, roughly 1.8 million gallons trucked in from outside Nueces County, then recirculated for four to seven years before it needs a refill. Municipal draw stays under 10,000 gallons a day, and that water goes to sinks and toilets, not server racks. Hailey Miller, Hut 8's senior director of regulatory and government affairs, told local reporters: "Under no circumstance will we use municipal water for cooling." Vertiv, whose gear anchors much of the mechanical build at Hut 8's Texas sites, has pointed to accounts like this one as evidence for its own liquid cooling investor thesis. Robstown sits in a part of Texas where evaporative cooling towers at other sites already draw hundreds of thousands of gallons a day from strained aquifers, and Beacon Point's design keeps it out of that fight entirely.
Hut 8 has not named the tenant behind either lease, only that it carries a high investment-grade rating, and that detail is doing more work than the redaction suggests. Elsewhere in the market, neocloud operators are watching deals stall because colocation providers won't sign without investment-grade credit behind the lease. CEO Asher Genoot has framed Beacon Point as a test of whether a power-first, cooling-ready campus can pull that level of commitment from a market this selective about counterparty risk. Twice now, at the same site, the market answered yes.
None of the $26.6 billion in company-wide contract value Hut 8 now holds survives without the thermal engineering underneath it. A 57 percent density gain squeezed out of the same acreage, a water loop that never touches a municipal main, a tenant with the credit to sign a 15-year commitment on both bets. Every gigawatt-scale campus chasing this kind of lease now has to clear the same two bars: sized right for the chip, and quiet on water. Miss either one, and the lease never gets signed at all.