Shares in Hut 8, the parent company of Trump-affiliated miner American Bitcoin, surged after it announced plans to develop four sites in the US.
Hut 8 climbed more than 10% to $25.91 after the “power-first” infrastructure and bitcoin mining company shared its expansion goals in a Tuesday press release. The four sites for development are in Texas, Louisiana, and Illinois, and will range in scale from 50 to 1,000 megawatts in capacity.
The company didn’t explicitly say what the facilities will be used for.
Wide scope of activities
Hut 8 currently operates 15 different facilities in both the US and Canada, covering mining operations, energy generation, and high-performance computing centres. The company’s digital infrastructure page notes five facilities are data centres directly dedicated to mining, and five are for high-performance computing infrastructure.
According to Hut 8’s second-quarter financial results, it generated $34.3 million in revenue from “Bitcoin Mining, GPU-as-a-Service, and Data Centre Cloud operations.”
Hut 8 “often leverages bitcoin mining to accelerate time to cash flow” in its facilities and is the parent company of Trump-family affiliated mining company American Bitcoin. Hut 8 supports its own bitcoin mining, as well as provides hosting and collaboration services for third-party miners.
According to Tuesday’s statement, Hut 8 currently has “90% of its 1,020 MW platform contracted,” and so seeks to expand in anticipation of increased demand. “We position ourselves to more than double the scale of our platform and address accelerating demand across energy-intensive use cases,” said Asher Genoot, CEO of Hut 8.
State-level regulation
Four facilities across three different states means that Hut 8 will have to account for local regulatory regimes. The company already operates facilities in Texas, but Illinois and Louisiana are new territory.
- Friendly: In 2024, Louisiana passed HB 488, which supports bitcoin mining in industrial areas, with the goal of boosting job-creation and attracting new businesses.
- Uncertain: Illinois has not yet passed direct regulations impacting cryptocurrency mining, however there are several facilities across the state.
Long-term goals
In the announcement, Hut 8 was clear that this was just an initial step.
“This expansion marks a defining step in Hut 8’s evolution into one of the largest energy and digital infrastructure platforms in the world,” said Genoot. “It represents just the first phase of execution against a multi-gigawatt energy origination pipeline that underpins our long-term growth trajectory.”
