HIVE Digital Technologies surged more than 7% Thursday after landing a landmark $220 million GPU cloud contract with Bell Canada and Toronto-based AI firm Cohere—marking the company’s biggest non-crypto deal to date and a clear signal that HIVE has moved decisively into AI infrastructure.
The three-year agreement is being delivered by HIVE’s BUZZ High Performance Computing subsidiary and will place 2,304 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs—chips built for cutting‑edge AI model training and inference—inside Bell’s purpose-built data center in Merritt, British Columbia. Cohere, which builds large language models and enterprise AI systems, will use that compute layer to run its platform for Canadian customers, including government agencies that require on‑shore infrastructure.
Why this matters
- Sovereign AI: The contract plugs directly into Canada’s Sovereign AI push. Ottawa has committed more than $2 billion to domestic AI compute and invested roughly $240 million in Cohere. Running critical AI workloads on infrastructure inside national borders—and under local control—matters a lot for government and regulated clients.
- Strategic anchor: Cohere, which recently announced a merger with Germany’s Aleph Alpha valuing the combined company at about $20 billion, was already partnered with Bell (since July 2025). This deal provides the physical compute layer for that relationship.
HIVE’s pivot from Bitcoin mining to AI compute
HIVE is no longer just a Bitcoin miner on paper: the company reported $278.3 million in Bitcoin mining revenue in its most recent quarter, but has been shifting capacity toward GPUs and AI since 2022. Recent moves include:
- Redirecting GPU capacity from crypto mining
- A GPU supply deal with Dell announced last November
- A $115 million convertible note offering in April to fund additional hardware purchases
HIVE says the Merritt deployment, expected to go live between late 2026 and early 2027, should add roughly $70 million in new annual recurring revenue on top of about $35 million it already earns from existing GPU operations—pushing its contracted high-performance computing (HPC) revenue above $100 million.
Broader strategy and market context
HIVE’s pivot mirrors a trend among former miners: Keel Infrastructure (ex-Bitfarms) recently sold its last Paraguay mining facility and is pursuing AI compute as well. The logic is straightforward—crypto mining returns can be volatile and compress during “crypto winters,” while AI compute demand is growing rapidly and often backed by multi‑year contracts, especially when government clients are involved.
Looking ahead, HIVE has an even bigger build planned: a proposed 320‑megawatt AI data center in the Greater Toronto Area that could house more than 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs at full build‑out. The company projects roughly $360 million in annualized recurring revenue from that facility at capacity and has set a broader target of $660 million in annualized HPC revenue by the end of 2028.
“This partnership with Bell and Cohere is a defining moment. BUZZ HPC is the GPU factory layer that transforms Canada’s AI ambitions from political promises into productive national assets,” HIVE executive chairman Frank Holmes said in a statement—framing the deal as both a commercial win and a national infrastructure milestone.
Bottom line: The Bell-Cohere contract gives HIVE tangible, multi-year AI revenue and validates its strategy to redeploy crypto-era GPU capacity into a fast‑growing, sovereign‑sensitive market—while underscoring how miners are increasingly reshaping themselves as AI infrastructure providers.
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