HIVE bets $185 million on 2,016 Blackwell Ultra GPUs to chase a $200 million ARR target

HIVE Digital Technologies announced Monday that its subsidiary BUZZ HPC has secured a five-year, ~$350 million contract for GPU cloud computing services with an unnamed investment-grade company.

The company expects the deal to drive its high-performance computing revenues to about $500,000 a day once the hardware is up and running in the fourth quarter.

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The agreement adds ~$70 million in annualized recurring revenue, and BUZZ HPC’s total annualized revenue rises to about $180 million.

Of that, about $35 million is realized today. The other $145 million is under contract to become operational through the end of 2026.

This is the second major GPU commitment HIVE has announced since June. At the same site, BUZZ HPC’s prior three-year, $220 million sovereign AI cloud deal deploys NVIDIA Grace Blackwell systems for Bell and Cohere.

Chief executive Aydin Kilic said, “We are pleased to announce this agreement as we accelerate towards our year-end target of $200 million of ARR for our GPU cloud business.”

BUZZ HPC will be deploying a dedicated cluster of 2,016 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs under the contract. They are housed in Quantum-X800 InfiniBand networked GB300 NVL72 rack-scale systems and VAST Data storage.

The design is based on NVIDIA’s reference architecture and supports large-scale AI training and inference for enterprise customers, HIVE said.

The cluster is on its way to the Bell AI Fabric site in Merritt, British Columbia. HIVE says the site is powered 100% by renewable hydroelectric energy and uses closed-loop liquid cooling that does not continually use water. The company plans to roll out the system later this year.

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For the cluster and related hardware and warranties, capital expenditure is about $185 million.

HIVE said it will fund the build in three ways. They are an upfront customer deposit of ~$35 million equal to 10% of the contract value, proceeds from its June 2026 zero-percent convertible bond, and equipment financing.

At the end of the term, HIVE still owns the infrastructure, which Kilic frames as a return play. The company is “using debt financing to lever the purchase of the GPUs to provide a very strong internal rate of return,” he said.

Executive Chairman Frank Holmes cited some 400 megawatts of Canadian capacity and the opportunity to bring more than 120,000 GPUs online over two years.

IREN struck a $9.7 billion cloud deal with Microsoft. Hut 8 signed a $7 billion data center lease linked to an Anthropic and Fluidstack partnership, and TeraWulf has joined a $9.5 billion Google-backed venture with Fluidstack.

HIVE stock was up 4% at the close Friday and trading up ~8% in Monday’s pre-market. In its most recent quarter, the company had $79.1 million in revenue, including $7.1 million from BUZZ HPC. Its contracted GPU cloud ARR has reached about $110 million.

In February, Cryptopolitan reported that the subsidiary had signed approximately $30 million in two-year AI cloud contracts. This was anchored by an initial 504-GPU deployment in Manitoba, with HPC segment revenue expected to climb from about $20 million to $35 million.

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