Briefly
- HIVE’s BUZZ HPC subsidiary closed a $220M, three-year GPU cloud contract with Bell Canada and Cohere, deploying 2,304 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs at Bell’s Merritt, BC facility.
- The deal pushes HIVE’s contracted high-performance computing income previous $100 million, including an anticipated $70M in new annual recurring income as soon as the deployment goes reside.
- HIVE inventory climbed greater than 7% on the TSX Thursday, as the corporate advances its long-running pivot from Bitcoin mining to AI infrastructure.
HIVE Digital Applied sciences inventory climbed greater than 7% on Thursday after the corporate introduced a $220 million GPU cloud contract with Bell Canada and Toronto-based AI agency Cohere—its largest deal but and the clearest signal thus far that the Bitcoin miner is now firmly within the AI infrastructure enterprise.
The contract runs three years and is delivered by way of HIVE’s subsidiary, BUZZ Excessive Efficiency Computing. It includes 2,304 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs—chips designed for frontier AI mannequin coaching and inference—put in at Bell’s purpose-built information heart in Merritt, British Columbia.
Cohere, a big language mannequin firm that builds AI techniques for enterprises and governments, will use that compute layer to run its platform for Canadian purchasers.
The time period “sovereign AI” will get thrown round rather a lot. In plain phrases, it means AI that runs on infrastructure inside your nation’s borders, on domestically managed information—which issues rather a lot when the purchasers are authorities companies. Canada has pushed laborious on this, with Ottawa committing over $2 billion to home AI compute as a part of its Sovereign AI Compute Technique and placing $240 million instantly into Cohere. This deal is the bodily layer of that guess.
Cohere is a becoming anchor for the association. The Toronto firm is without doubt one of the few anyplace constructing basis fashions—the base-layer AI that powers enterprise chatbots, authorities doc processing, and all the pieces in between—and not too long ago introduced a merger with Germany’s Aleph Alpha that values the mixed firm at roughly $20 billion. Bell and Cohere had an present partnership courting to July 2025; this contract is the compute infrastructure beneath it.
“Canada helped pioneer trendy synthetic intelligence. What we’ve got lacked shouldn’t be expertise, it’s industrial infrastructure to commercialize that expertise at scale earlier than others do it for us,” Frank Holmes, govt chairman at HIVE Digital Applied sciences, mentioned in a press release. “This partnership with Bell and Cohere is a defining second. BUZZ HPC is the GPU manufacturing unit layer that transforms Canada’s AI ambitions from political guarantees into productive nationwide belongings”
For HIVE, which reported $278.3M Bitcoin mining income in its final quarter, that is the newest chapter in a pivot underway since 2022.
The corporate started its AI shift by redirecting GPU capability from crypto mining, touchdown a take care of Dell for brand new GPUs final November and shutting a $115 million convertible observe providing in April to fund {hardware} purchases. It is not alone: Keel Infrastructure, previously Bitfarms, offered off its final Paraguay mining facility in April and is working the identical playbook.
Crypto mining returns are risky and get more durable as extra miners compete for block rewards. Issues get even more durable throughout crypto winters, downturns out there, as rewards change into more and more much less enticing as the value of crypto belongings go down however prices keep the identical or go up.
On the alternative aspect, AI compute demand is rising quick and purchasers—particularly authorities companies—signal multi-year contracts at locked-in charges. Buying and selling one bubble for one more, possibly, however at the least this one has a authorities mandate behind it.
As soon as the deployment goes reside—anticipated between late 2026 and early 2027—HIVE expects roughly $70 million in new annual recurring income on prime of the $35 million it already books from present GPU operations. Its contracted HPC income goal now exceeds $100 million.
The corporate additionally has a bigger venture within the works: a 320-megawatt AI information heart within the Better Toronto Space designed to deal with greater than 100,000 Nvidia GPUs at full build-out.
HIVE expects the ability to generate roughly $360 million in annualized recurring income at full operation and has set a broader goal of $660 million in annualized HPC income by the tip of 2028.
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