For the better part of two weeks, Hut 8, the tenant behind one of the largest data center leases in Texas history, was only available as a negative, described in its filings as an “unnamed, investment-grade hyperscaler,” and now Financial Times it says its name is Nvidia.
The FT informed Nvidia is behind two 15-year leases at Hut 8’s Beacon Point campus near Corpus Christi in Nueces County, and the deal could be worth $50 billion to the developer over the entire term, citing five people familiar with the arrangement.
Hut 8 did not respond to requests for comment, and Nvidia has not confirmed it is the tenant.
The circularity implied by the story is already familiar territory: Nvidia is reportedly in separate talks. Stop the $250 billion OpenAI debtand bought one $2.1 billion warrant on IREN as part of the 5GW neocloud deal earlier this year.
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The $50 billion cap is worth mentioning because the contract base is both small and already open.
Hut 8 announced the first 352 MW lease weeks ago, worth $9.8 billion based on a ternary network for 15 years, then doubled it on July 20 with a second 352 MW lease that brought the campus’s principal term value. $19.6 billion.
The path to $50 billion, or more precisely $50.2 billion, is through three five-year renewal options attached to each lease. Implement them all and the rent goes through the roof; release them and it doesn’t go away. So the number on the slug is a maximum, not a signed commitment.
What is not in doubt is the shape of the campus. Beacon Point sits on 525 acres with one gigawatt of utility capacity secured by an interconnection agreement with AEP Texas and is being built to Nvidia’s DSX reference architecture for gigawatt-scale artificial intelligence factories.
Hut 8 expects to deliver power to the site in the first quarter of 2027, and the Phase II data hall in the second quarter of 2028.
The company, which until fairly recently was a bitcoin miner, has now licensed 704 of its 949 megawatts to its AI portfolio, under terms it disclosed without naming the lessee.
If FT that’s right, the arrangement puts Nvidia on three sides of the same table at once. It designs the reference architecture built around the campus, provides the chips to fill the halls, and now it seems like the tenant that makes everything profitable.
This example is not limited to Nvidia either. Google came quietly $44 billion More than $6.5 billion in lease payments nine months ago on data centers it doesn’t own as it pushes its own TPU chips against Nvidia.
Former crypto miners in Texas have since become the preferred vehicle for these builds Numeric password raised $810 million in junk bonds to build another campus with the same logic, long, investment-grade leases make debt cheaper.
The appeal of a tenant like Nvidia for Hut 8 is obvious, as a lease is only as good as the credit behind it, and few names in tech currently carry more. Silence is harder to read.
Hut 8 has every commercial reason to sound an anchor of this caliber, suggesting that modesty is contractual rather than modest, the kind of privacy that big hyperscalers routinely write into their leases. FT‘s sources have now stepped around.
Whether or not the full $50 billion is ever paid, no one can predict the options that won’t be tested 15 years from now and into the 2040s.
What Hut 8 actually banked is $19.6 billion. The market’s takeaway from the report, narrower and more immediate, is that the money behind Corpus Christi’s newest gigawatt is likely Nvidia’s.
