HIVE Digital Technologies saw a significant uptick in its stock price, climbing over 7% on Thursday following the announcement of a substantial $220 million GPU cloud contract. This pivotal agreement, forged with Bell Canada and the Toronto-based AI firm Cohere, marks a strategic shift for the company, traditionally recognized for its Bitcoin mining, as it transitions firmly into the AI infrastructure sector.
The three-year contract will be executed through HIVE’s subsidiary, BUZZ High Performance Computing, and entails the deployment of 2,304 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs. These advanced chips are specifically designed for pioneering AI model training and inference tasks, which will be installed at Bell’s dedicated data center located in Merritt, British Columbia.
Cohere is a notable player in the realm of large language models, developing AI systems tailored for enterprise and government use. The new compute layer provided by HIVE will support Cohere’s platform, catering to clients across Canada. This move aligns with Canada’s push for “sovereign AI,” a framework emphasizing that artificial intelligence infrastructure operates within national borders and is under local control—a particularly sensitive issue for government agencies. The Canadian government has committed over $2 billion to bolster domestic AI computing capabilities, with a direct investment of $240 million into Cohere as part of this initiative.
The partnership not only strengthens the existing collaboration between Bell and Cohere, which dates back to July 2025, but also positions HIVE at the forefront of this burgeoning sector. Frank Holmes, executive chairman of HIVE, articulated the significance of this partnership, stating, “Canada helped pioneer modern artificial intelligence. What we have lacked is not talent, it is industrial infrastructure to commercialize that talent at scale before others do it for us. This partnership with Bell and Cohere is a defining moment.”
HIVE’s transition from Bitcoin mining to AI is underscored by its recent financial maneuvers, which include redirecting its GPU capacity away from cryptocurrency mining in favor of artificial intelligence applications. In November, the company secured a deal with Dell for new GPUs, further reinforcing this shift. The competitive landscape of crypto mining, marked by volatility and challenging returns, has prompted several other firms, like Keel Infrastructure, to pursue similar transformations.
As HIVE prepares for the anticipated deployment of the new infrastructure, expected between late 2026 and early 2027, the company projects an annual recurring revenue increase of approximately $70 million. This will augment the $35 million already generated from its existing GPU operations, elevating its contracted HPC revenue target to exceed $100 million.
Additionally, HIVE is working on a larger-scale project: a 320-megawatt AI data center in the Greater Toronto Area, designed to accommodate over 100,000 Nvidia GPUs when fully operational. This facility is expected to generate around $360 million in annualized recurring revenue, contributing to HIVE’s overarching goal of achieving $660 million in annualized HPC revenue by the end of 2028.
