Hut 8's $27 billion of AI leases cover 949 megawatts; the other 6,910 need about $73 billion to build

The miner-to-AI conversion got its first public price tag this week, and Hut 8's▼−8.83% — Hut 8, down 8.83 percent today shares spent two days paying for it: down 7.21% on November 13 and 3.82% on November 14 ¹². On November 14, Coinpaper tallied Core Scientific's April 2026 financing disclosure↗ and put the cost of turning a Bitcoin mine into an AI data center at about $9.3 million a megawatt ³. Laid against Hut 8's pipeline, that arithmetic splits the company in two ³.

The November 4 third-quarter call↗ had described the signed half: 949 megawatts of IT capacity contracted under AI leases running 15 to 17 years, worth about $27 billion in base-term revenue ⁴. The quarter's receipts ran the other way. Revenue was $71.1 million, against $83.5 million a year earlier, and most of the quarter's $189.5 million of net income was an unrealized mark on bitcoin ⁵.

The distance between those numbers is a construction project. Construction gets paid now.

The leases are signed; the buildings are not

Nothing hands over before the second quarter of 2027, when the first data hall at River Bend, Louisiana is due↗; Beacon Point in Texas follows in the third quarter of 2027 and into 2028 ⁵. Chief executive Asher Genoot says each campus will be "funded entirely at the project level, without requiring equity issuance or recourse debt at the parent" ⁵.

So far that funding means $7.5 billion of bonds tied to River Bend and Beacon Point's first phase, non-recourse in that lenders can claim only the individual project, not the parent company ⁴. Hut 8 also closed a $1.07 billion revolving credit facility, undrawn, and holds about $6.6 billion of cash ⁵. The bill has started regardless: quarterly interest expense of $105 million now outruns revenue ⁵.

The rest of the pipeline is a $73 billion bill

Core Scientific▼−0.70% — Core Scientific, down 0.70 percent today, the first miner to make this pivot, disclosed $5.5 billion of construction spend for 590 contracted megawatts in its April financing documents, tallied by Coinpaper on November 14 ³. That is about $9.3 million a megawatt, because an AI hall needs liquid cooling, dense electrical distribution and fiber that a shed of Bitcoin mining chips never had ³.

At that rate, Hut 8's 7,859-megawatt pipeline implies roughly $73 billion of building, close to ten times the bonds raised so far ³⁴. Financing for Beacon Point's second phase is still being "evaluated" ⁵.

The market started charging for the gap this week

Keel, the former Bitfarms and a fellow convert, fell about 20% when its chief executive said no AI leases would be signed this year ⁶. Hut 8 itself jumped 16% on the day it reported ⁷.

The bitcoin that bridges the build slid toward $60,000 as exchange-traded-fund outflows hit a seventh straight day↗ ⁸. Hut 8 has already funded about $250 million of buybacks by selling roughly 3,100 coins ⁴.

None of this doubts the demand. OpenAIPVT$1.18T — OpenAI, private, latest valuation $1.18T chief executive Sam Altman's line is that the bottleneck for AI "isn't code, it's electrons," and River Bend sits on a $7 billion contract with Google and Anthropic↗ ⁶. Power is the scarce asset; on this arithmetic, the constraint has moved from holding it to financing the buildings on it.

The marker is the River Bend handover in the second quarter of 2027 ⁵. Until a tenant switches on, the $27 billion headline covers only the 949 leased megawatts, and the other 6,910 earn nothing until the pipeline's roughly $73 billion bill is raised and spent ⁵. Anyone buying the headline is paying for megawatts with no tenant.