$220 million on cloud GPUs: How HIVE Digital transforms mining into AI infrastructure
The high-performance computing (HPC) market continues to attract major crypto miners. HIVE Digital Technologies' division — BUZZ HPC — has signed a three-year contract to provide cloud GPU services to telecom giant Bell Canada and Cohere. The deal's value is impressive: approximately $220 million.
A key detail is the technical component. BUZZ HPC will deploy over 2,300 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell graphics accelerators at the Bell AI Fabric facility located in the Canadian province of British Columbia. This is not just equipment rental — it is a full integration of AI infrastructure into the cloud ecosystem of a major operator.
The Financial Arithmetic of the Deal
According to my analysis, the system launch is expected in late 2026 to early 2027. Given HIVE's current annual recurring revenue of $35 million, the new contract promises an increase of approximately $70 million per year. Thus, upon reaching full capacity, the company's contract revenue could triple.
For HIVE, this is not just diversification — it is a strategic pivot. The company, historically known as a Bitcoin miner, is now increasingly positioning itself as an HPC service provider for the corporate sector. And this makes sense: the margins on cloud GPU services for AI workloads under current conditions are significantly higher than BTC mining, considering the halving and rising network difficulty.
My conclusion: The deal with Bell Canada and Cohere is not a one-off contract but a signal to the market. Major players from traditional telecom and the AI sector are willing to pay a premium for access to high-performance GPUs, especially if the provider has experience managing energy-intensive data centers. HIVE Digital Technologies is confidently entering a new league — the league of infrastructure providers for artificial intelligence. And this, in my view, is a much more stable source of income than the volatile cryptocurrency market.