Dec 17 (Reuters) – Hut 8 (HUT) has signed a deal valued at about $7 billion to lease a data center in ​Louisiana, it said on Wednesday, as former cryptocurrency miners pivot ‌to meet surging demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Its shares rose 21% in premarket trading, ‌adding to the roughly 80% jump this year.

The company will sign a 15-year lease agreement to develop a 245-megawatt data center in the River Bend campus. Construction of the first phase is expected to be completed ⁠by early 2027.

The transition ‌from crypto mining to AI hosting has become a key trend for firms like Hut 8, CoreWeave, ‍and Applied Digital that are repurposing their access to high-voltage power, cooling systems and specialized real estate. These assets are increasingly scarce as AI developers race ​to deploy Nvidia graphics processing units and other essential hardware.

Hut ‌8, once a pure-play bitcoin miner, has spent the last year repositioning itself as an energy infrastructure platform.

The new deal involves partnerships with AI model developer Anthropic and infrastructure provider Fluidstack. Alphabet-owned Google is providing a financial backstop for the 15-year term, a move that ⁠highlights major cloud providers’ urgency to ​secure capacity for power-intensive AI technologies.

The agreement ​is also part of a broader collaboration between Hut 8 and Anthropic that could eventually scale to 2.3 gigawatts ‍of capacity. Last ⁠month, Anthropic announced a $50 billion investment to build data centers alongside Fluidstack.

Hut 8 said last month that it had a ⁠total power pipeline of 8.65 gigawatts, ranging from early-stage site diligence to 1.53 gigawatts ‌of late-stage projects under active development.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram ‌in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)