- Bitcoin miners-turned-neoclouds Hut 8 and IREN are turning AI infrastructure demand into multi-billion-dollar customer contracts
- IREN landed $2.8B in new cloud deals, while Hut 8 secured a major lease deal for its new Texas data center
- Analysts say neoclouds are poised to grab a major share of AI cloud spending
Bitcoin mining operators-turned-neoclouds Hut 8 and IREN turned heads this week, each announcing multi-billion-dollar contracts with big name tenants on Monday.
IREN led with the news that it signed $2.8 billion worth of new multi-year cloud services contracts with “leading AI developers.” Its customer base now includes “Microsoft, NVIDIA, Perplexity, Figure AI, Together AI, Fluidstack, Fireworks AI, Fal AI, Hume AI, and a new leading AI developer.”
IREN previously bagged a $9.7 billion AI infrastructure deal with Microsoft in November 2025.
Growing backlash against data centers has raised some red flags around the financial risk associated with serving AI contracts. But IREN noted its recent contracts have included customer prepayments covering nearly half (45%) of the GPU capital expenditure associated with those deployments, reducing the amount of capital it has to spend on those deployments.
The company raised its annualized run-rate revenue target by $300 million on the news.
Meanwhile, Hut 8 announced it signed a 15-year, $9.8 billion lease deal for 352 MW of Phase 2 capacity at its Beacon Point data center campus in Texas. It did not name the tenant, but indicated it is a “high-investment-grade company” that had already contracted 352 MW of capacity from Phase 1 of its campus buildout.
The first capacity from Phase 2 is expected to come online in Q2 2028.
The lease agreement comes with three, five-year renewal options that could raise the total contract value to $50.2 billion.
Growing neocloud market
While hyperscalers tend to generate the most headlines, neoclouds – which specialize in high performance infrastructure for AI – are poised to capture a large chunk of the AI cloud market.
Last month, Gartner predicted that neocloud players will account for 20% of the $267 billion AI cloud market by 2030. In other words, neoclouds will be raking in $53.4 billion in revenue by 2030.
Synergy Research Group had an even more optimistic take on where things are headed, pegging the neocloud market as approaching $400 billion by 2031.
“The AI cloud market is entering a new phase where sovereignty, performance, and infrastructure specialization are becoming primary decision factors for enterprises,” Gartner Senior Director Analyst Enrique Castera said. “As demand for GPU-intensive workloads accelerates and traditional cloud models struggle to keep pace, it is creating the conditions for a new class of providers purpose-built to deliver AI infrastructure at scale.”
Read more about neocloud growth:
What you need to know about neocloud hotshot IREN
The Five Nine: Crypto companies mine for AI gold
Everyone wants to be a neocloud now – It’s not that easy
SoftBank's AI ambitions take shape around power, compute and cloud
Google is building a new $5B neocloud with Blackstone – but why?