AI compute stocks bounce as Hut 8, IREN land billions in new contracts

Shares of bitcoin miners turned AI infrastructure providers surged Monday after Hut 8 (HUT) and IREN (IREN) announced billions of dollars in new contracts, easing concerns that demand for AI computing capacity may be slowing.

Hut 8 rose as much as 17% after signing a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease for the second phase of its Beacon Point AI data center campus in Texas. The agreement, with the same investment-grade customer that leased the first phase, doubles the tenant's footprint to 704 megawatts (MW) and fully commercializes the site's 1 gigawatt of power capacity.

IREN gained as much as 19% after announcing $2.8 billion in new multiyear cloud services contracts with AI developers. The company raised its year-end AI Cloud annualized run-rate revenue target to more than $4 billion, saying about 85% of that revenue is now under contract.

The news spilled over to peers across the high-performance compute sector. Mining (CIFR) gained 11% and TeraWulf (WULF) added 6.4%. Bitcoin miners Riot Platforms (RIOT) and MARA Holdings (MARA) advanced 5% and 9%, respectively. The CoinShares Bitcoin Miners ETF (WGMI) rose 8.5%.

The share-price surge comes after AI infrastructure companies stumbled in recent weeks as investors questioned whether the industry's breakneck spending on data centers would continue.

Earlier buoyant sentiment cooled after Chinese firms released open-source AI models that appeared to require less computing power than Western rivals. Before that, reports that Facebook parent Meta Platforms (META) was considering a cloud service to rent AI computing capacity also raised concerns that additional supply could weigh on data center operators.

UPDATE (July 20, 15:08 UTC): Rewrites headline, first paragraph to add IREN contracts, adds IREN in third paragraph and updates share price moves.

CEX trading volumes rose for the first time in five months in June, with spot climbing 15.3% to $1.11T and RWA perpetual volumes surging to a record $311B.

CEX trading volumes rose for the first time in five months in June, with spot climbing 15.3% to $1.11T and RWA perpetual volumes surging to a record $311B.

CEX trading volumes rose for the first time in five months in June, with spot climbing 15.3% to $1.11T and RWA perpetual volumes surging to a record $311B.