Hut 8 shareholders carry River Bend's interest and tax bill until the first hall opens in 2027

The full cost stack of River Bend, Hut 8's▼−13.13% — Hut 8, down 13.13 percent today $10 billion AI data center campus in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, went public this week, and it reads as the price of building the part of the AI boom that models alone cannot build: land, power and halls. Hut 8, the Miami company converting a bitcoin-mining power portfolio into AI infrastructure, now has a deal with public numbers on both sides.

Parish President Kenny Havard told WWL Louisiana↗ the parish settled on payments of $90 million a year from Hut 8 on land that would otherwise owe about $120 million in property taxes ¹. The company has already paid $10 million of those taxes in advance and $16 million for the parish's water system ¹.

On top of the tax discount sits debt service: the campus was financed with $3.25 billion of senior secured notes sold in April↗, and at their stated coupon the annual interest runs near $200 million ². None of it earns revenue until the first hall opens, which Hut 8 targets for the second quarter of 2027 ³.

The Google backstop is what made the financing possible

The revenue side is contracted before a hall opens. Fluidstack, a GPU-cloud intermediary whose expected end tenant is AnthropicPVT$350B — Anthropic, private, latest valuation $350B, signed a 15-year, $7 billion lease↗ for River Bend's first 245 megawatts, with Google financially backstopping the payments ³.

Anthropic has confirmed it is the expected tenant↗ ⁴. That backstop is what let the project subsidiary reach the investment-grade bond market, a first for a single-sponsor data center, with the debt non-recourse to Hut 8's parent ².

Hut 8 has since repeated the structure at Beacon Point in Texas and holds $26.6 billion of contracted lease value across the two campuses ². Analysts at Maxim project those leases to average more than $1.75 billion a year in operating income↗ once all halls deliver in late 2028 ⁷.

The parish kept more tax than Meta, and negotiated it in public

West Feliciana's terms look generous to the taxpayer by Louisiana standards, where the data-center boom has run on giveaways. Meta's▼−1.52% — Meta, down 1.52 percent today Richland Parish deal offered property-tax reductions as steep as 80% ¹. Havard negotiated without nondisclosure agreements, posted the tax deal online, and held hearings in the open while the state's economic development agency signed its own NDA with Anthropic ⁴.

The politics sit close to the deal: a wholly owned Hut 8 subsidiary gave $25,000 to Gov ⁴. Jeff Landry's PAC in June, months before the October 5 groundbreaking, where Donald Trump Jr., the company's partner in a bitcoin venture, appeared with Landry ⁴. Hut 8 says contributions are separate from commercial decisions, and the terms make the same case in numbers: the parish kept more tax than Meta did ¹⁴.

The delivery date, not the groundbreaking, is the investment case

Hut 8 reports third-quarter results on November 4↗, with consensus expecting a loss of about $0.75 a share on revenue of $76.5 million, after last quarter's miss ⁵. The revenue line is still a bitcoin-mining baseline and will stay that way for several quarters.

What investors are actually pricing is execution: the first hall in the second quarter of 2027, run-rate income by late 2028 ³⁷. River Bend's model, contracted cash from creditworthy counterparties funding the power and buildings between AI models and the people who use them, is the most defensible part of the AI buildout, and the builder who executes it deserves the reward. The risk is a construction slip, and the test date is already on the calendar.