Hut 8 closes two-tier AI data center finance structure with JPMorgan leading a 12-bank revolver facility.

Wall Street is now financing AI data centers the way it has long financed regulated power plants and toll roads—with long-duration, fully amortizing, investment-grade bonds backed by contracted cash flows, plus a corporate revolving credit line to bridge the gaps. Hut 8 Corp. (Nasdaq/TSX: HUT) became the first independent developer to assemble that complete two-tier structure on September 24, 2026, announcing the closing of a $1.07 billion revolving facility led by JPMorgan Chase.

The deal adds a flexible parent-level liquidity layer on top of the $7.5 billion in non-recourse, investment-grade project bonds Hut 8 has already secured for two flagship AI data center campuses in Louisiana and Texas. The result is a capital architecture that analysts and bank advisors now expect other hyperscale independent developers to study closely and potentially replicate.

**How Project Finance Crossed from Pipelines to GPUs**

Hut 8's financing model did not originate in technology. It comes from the infrastructure sector project finance tradition—specifically, from the capital structures that have long governed oil pipelines, LNG terminals, toll highways, and regulated utilities. All share a core attribute that made them fundable on investment-grade terms even before producing revenue: a long-duration, creditworthy offtake contract that converts uncertain future cash flows into something a bond investor can underwrite.

Hut 8 applied that exact template to AI data center construction. At its River Bend campus in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, the company signed a Google-backstopped Fluidstack lease—a 15-year, $7.0 billion agreement for 245 megawatts (approximately 0.3 million square feet) of critical IT capacity. Crucially, the lease payments are financially backstopped by Google, an investment-grade counterparty, transforming what is nominally a lease with an AI compute startup into an obligation backed by one of the largest companies in the world.

That contracted cash flow profile—long-tenor, take-or-pay, investment-grade counterparty—enabled Hut 8 to bring River Bend to the investment-grade bond market in April 2026. The $3.25 billion offering of fully amortizing senior secured notes due 2042, priced at 6.192%, was rated BBB- by both S&P Global Ratings and Fitch, making it the first single-sponsor data center project to access the investment-grade construction bond market. Milbank LLP, which advised Hut 8, noted the deal also achieved a record 95% loan-to-cost ratio—the highest ever achieved for a high-performance computing data center bond.

The company repeated the model for its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas, pricing $4.25 billion in notes in June 2026 at 6.129%—rated Baa2 by Moody's and priced 20 basis points tighter than the River Bend notes. That spread compression, on a deal $1 billion larger than the first, reflected the bond market's growing confidence in the model's repeatability.

CEO Asher Genoot noted at the Beacon Point close that "the investment-grade market has historically not been available to finance project-level data center construction."

**What the Revolver Actually Does—and Why the Letter-of-Credit Sublimit Matters**

The $1.07 billion revolving facility completes the capital stack's upper tier. Where the non-recourse project bonds at River Bend and Beacon Point are locked in place—ring-fenced within project subsidiaries, amortizing on schedule, secured by underlying campus assets—the revolving facility operates at the parent company level and offers what the project bonds cannot: the ability to draw, repay, and re-draw on demand without prepayment penalties.

That flexibility matters at the development stage. Building a hyperscale AI campus requires major capital commitments—land acquisition, utility interconnection, foundation work, long-lead equipment procurement—well before a project is de-risked enough to support long-term fixed-rate bonds. A revolving line at the parent level lets Hut 8 fund those early costs and then repay the revolver once cheaper, longer-duration project financing is in place.

CFO Sean Glennan described the logic directly: the revolver "adds more than $1 billion of committed, non-dilutive bank liquidity at the parent level, giving us the ability to fund projects through development while we determine the optimal timing and structure for long-term, non-recourse financing as they de-risk."

One detail buried in the credit agreement's term sheet is the letter-of-credit sublimit—the full $1.07 billion facility can be used to post letters of credit rather than cash. This matters operationally for a company in Hut 8's position. Interconnection agreements with utilities such as AEP Texas require developers to post significant security deposits to hold queue positions on the grid; construction contracts require performance bonds; equipment vendors frequently require advance payment guarantees. All of these have historically required cash collateral. A bank-backed letter of credit substitutes for the cash posting, freeing capital for actual construction spending rather than locking it up as collateral.

JPMorgan Chase Bank acted as lead left arranger, bookrunner, and administrative agent. Citi, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley served as joint lead arrangers and joint bookrunners—the same bank quartet that ran both project bond offerings. Pricing stands at SOFR plus 175 basis points initially (ranging from SOFR plus 150 to SOFR plus 200 based on the company's consolidated debt-to-market-capitalization ratio), comparing favorably to Applied Digital's SOFR plus 225 facility arranged by Goldman Sachs in May 2026.

**What Hut 8 Is Actually Building**

Beacon Point, in Nueces County, Texas, is fully contracted. The campus holds a 1,000 megawatt interconnection agreement with AEP Texas and is currently under construction, with initial data hall delivery expected in the third quarter of 2027. As of July 20, 2026, a single investment-grade tenant has 704 megawatts contracted across two 15-year leases totaling $19.6 billion in base-term contract value.

River Bend, in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, is under active construction, with initial data hall delivery targeted for the second quarter of 2027. The campus's first tranche—245 megawatts of critical IT capacity—is fully funded by the $3.25 billion project bond and leased to Fluidstack, with payments backstopped by Google. The Fluidstack lease also grants a right of first offer on up to 1,000 megawatts of potential expansion capacity, subject to available power.

Hut 8 has a separate strategic partnership with Anthropic—the AI safety company—to develop up to 2,295 megawatts of AI infrastructure capacity across the United States, with River Bend as the anchor site.

Across both campuses, Hut 8 has contracted 949 megawatts of capacity with an aggregate base-term contract value of approximately $26.6 billion and projected average annual net operating income exceeding $1.75 billion. All contracted capacity is leased to or financially backstopped by investment-grade counterparties under triple-net, take-or-pay terms.

**What This Means for AI Data Center Finance**

The deal arrives amid exceptional activity in AI infrastructure financing. JPMorgan's September 2026 estimate projects capex for the five largest US hyperscalers will reach $697 billion in 2026 alone—up $173 billion from projections at the start of the year. John Servidea, global co-head of Investment Grade Finance at JPMorgan, has called AI financing "the biggest secular theme in our professional lifetimes."

The constraint on building AI data centers is no longer capital availability in the abstract—it is the ability to deploy capital fast enough. Site acquisition, utility interconnection, and construction must happen before a hyperscale tenant commits to a lease; a lease must be signed before a project bond can be underwritten.