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Benchmark raises Hut 8 target nearly 20% after Beacon Point AI expansion

Benchmark raises Hut 8 target nearly 20% after Beacon Point AI expansion

Hut 8’s second 15-year Beacon Point lease in Texas doubled contracted capacity to 704 megawatts, fully commercialized the AI campus, and helped fuel broader gains in Bitcoin miners tied to AI compute demand.

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Fact Check
Every element of the claim is corroborated by multiple independent sources. The Block and GuruFocus both confirm Benchmark analyst Mark Palmer raised Hut 8's target to $195 from $165 (a +18.18% increase, matching 'nearly 20%') on July 22, 2026. The Block, Pulse 2.0, and multiple search results confirm the Beacon Point AI campus reached full commercialization via a second $9.8B lease that doubled contracted capacity to 704 MW and brought total base-term contract value to $19.6 billion. Bitcoin Magazine independently confirms the same target raise and 704 MW figure. The claim's characterization of 'nearly 20%' is slightly rounded up from 18.18% but reasonable.
Summary

Benchmark raised Hut 8's price target to $195 from $165 after the company's Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas, reached full commercialization following a second 15-year lease with an existing tenant for 352 megawatts of IT capacity, or $9.8 billion. The deal doubled Beacon Point's contracted capacity to 704 megawatts against 1,000 megawatts of utility capacity and lifted total contracted value to $19.6 billion. Analyst Mark Palmer said Hut 8's strategy of securing power and site-matched tenants before construction supports viewing it more like a data center REIT with power assets. Hut 8 shares, which had closed around $111 and were up 120% year to date, also gained alongside other publicly traded Bitcoin miners even as Bitcoin fell about 2% to $64,760 and the Nasdaq declined, underscoring investor interest in miners' AI and high-performance computing businesses.

Terms & Concepts
  • contracted capacity: Power or infrastructure committed to customers under signed commercial agreements.
  • data center REIT: A real estate investment trust focused on owning and leasing data center facilities and related infrastructure.
  • high-performance computing: Advanced computing used for intensive workloads such as AI training, scientific modeling, and large-scale data processing.