Benchmark Raises Hut 8 Price Target to ~$195, Calls Bitcoin Miner Turned AI Landlord a "Power-First Data Center REIT"
Analyst Mark Palmer lifted his target an additional 18% on July 22, citing a second $9.8 billion lease at the company's Texas campus that brings its total contracted AI infrastructure value above $27 billion.
Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer raised his price target for Hut 8 Corp. (NASDAQ: HUT) from $165 to approximately $195 on Wednesday, per The Block's reporting, maintaining a Buy rating and implying roughly 75% upside from the stock's price near $111 at the time of publication. The move came two days after Hut 8 announced a second 15-year, 352-megawatt lease at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas, with the same unnamed investment-grade tenant that signed the first phase of the deal on July 14.
The back-to-back raises are notable in their speed. On July 14, Palmer had already nearly doubled his target from $85 to $165, citing $16.8 billion in contracted lease value across two campuses. The latest revision adds the Phase 2 Beacon Point deal to that math, pushing the campus-level contracted value to $19.6 billion on a base-term basis. If the tenant exercises renewal options, the total potential value of the Beacon Point leases rises to $50.2 billion. Hut 8 has secured $4.25 billion in investment-grade project financing for the campus.
Palmer's framing of the company as "a power-first data center REIT with an embedded development machine," introduced in his July 14 note and extended in the latest revision, is a specific and deliberate revaluation framework.
In a traditional real estate investment trust, a company generates predictable income by leasing physical property under long-term contracts. Hut 8 is applying that same structure to AI power infrastructure. The Beacon Point leases are triple-net agreements, meaning the tenant covers operating costs, taxes, and insurance on top of base rent. They carry a 3% annual rent escalator, with initial energization targeted for Q1 2027 and first data hall delivery in Q3 2027. The campus is built to NVIDIA's DSX reference architecture, a standard designed for gigawatt-scale AI workloads.
Not every analyst shares that enthusiasm. Rosenblatt maintained its Buy rating on July 21 with an unchanged target of $124, suggesting a more conservative view of the company's near-term fundamentals. That conservatism has some basis: Hut 8 reported a net loss of $253 million in Q1 2026, and the company does not expect material AI revenue to begin until Q2 2027. The street consensus sits around $129 to $134, well below Benchmark's target, and HUT shares have already surged roughly 120% year to date, trading between $44 and $133 in 2026.
Hut 8's trajectory reflects a sector-wide structural shift. According to CoinShares data, AI and high-performance computing could account for up to 70% of listed Bitcoin miners' revenues by end of 2026, with traditional mining revenue shrinking from roughly 85% to under 20% for companies that secured major contracts. Hut 8 began its pivot in December 2025, when it announced a $7 billion, 15-year lease at its River Bend campus in Louisiana with Fluidstack, backed by a Google backstop, alongside a separate agreement to develop up to 2,295 megawatts of data center capacity for Anthropic. TeraWulf (NASDAQ: WULF) signed a roughly $19 billion, 20-year lease with Anthropic for 401 megawatts in Kentucky in July 2026. Core Scientific (NASDAQ: CORZ), already collecting rent from CoreWeave on 243 megawatts, has signaled plans to exit Bitcoin mining entirely before the end of this year.
Regional Context: What the Hut 8 Model Signals Outside the United States
For markets in South Asia and Africa, the Hut 8 pivot illustrates a financing structure that may be directly replicable. India's data center market is projected to grow from roughly $1.7 billion in FY26 to $6.8 billion by FY30, driven by AI adoption, 5G rollout, and data localization rules. Digital Connexion, a joint venture of Reliance Industries, Brookfield, and Digital Realty, is already committing $11 billion toward AI-native data centers in southern India through 2030, in an approach that echoes the REIT-like model Hut 8 is deploying.
In Africa, the data center construction market is forecast to grow at a compound annual rate of 24.26% through 2031, with an additional $8.76 billion in investment expected across key hubs in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, and Egypt. NVIDIA has announced an AI factory in Kenya with 12,000 GPUs, showing that hyperscaler-grade infrastructure deals are starting to reach African markets. The triple-net structure Hut 8 uses, where the landlord controls land and power while the tenant operates the compute stack, is a model that energy-rich but capital-constrained infrastructure developers in both regions could adapt to de-risk project financing. The Hut 8 approach of securing a long-term hyperscaler contract before breaking ground on construction offers a potential framework for developers in both regions to reduce demand-side risk and strengthen the conditions for attracting project financing.
For crypto communities in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, the broader shift carries a more direct implication: large-scale operations that previously competed for cheap electricity to mine Bitcoin are now redirecting that capacity toward AI workloads, which can offer more predictable revenue. That reallocation may reduce near-term growth in Bitcoin's global hash rate among institutional miners.
Hut 8 is scheduled to begin energizing Beacon Point in Q1 2027. Until then, the gap between contracted value and actual revenue leaves the stock's near-term valuation dependent almost entirely on analyst confidence in deal execution.