Bitcoin Miner Hut 8 Launches GPU-as-a-Service Vertical

Data center operator Hut 8 may soon begin reporting revenues for its new GPU-as-a-Service vertical in addition to its existing Bitcoin mining and cloud computing segments.

On Thursday, Hut 8 announced that it has partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to establish a cluster powered by 1,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, which are hosted at a tier-three data center in Chicago.

Hut 8 said the new service, launched by its subsidiary, Highrise AI, has started generating revenue as the inaugural GPU cluster for an unnamed AI cloud developer has come fully online.

According to Hut 8, its five-year agreement with the AI cloud developer includes “fixed infrastructure payments plus revenue-sharing,” although no specific revenue projections were disclosed.

In Q2, proprietary bitcoin mining accounted for 39.5% of Hut 8’s total revenue of $35.2 million, while managed data center services and cloud computing contributed 25.6% and 9.55%, respectively.

Hut 8 is one of several publicly traded Bitcoin mining companies that have expanded their power capacities to support high-performance and AI computing, following bitcoin’s fourth halving earlier this year.

The AI revenue expansion comes a week after Hut 8 announced a 15 EH/s hosting contract with Bitmain to colocate the mining equipment manufacturer’s latest product, the U3S21EXPH.

Hut 8’s stock price rose by 4.63% during pre-market trading hours on Thursday.