Hut 8 starts a $399M campus under $19.6B in leases

Hut 8 Corp. starts work next week on Beacon Point, a 657,130-square-foot data center at 4650 FM 1694 in Robstown, in Nueces County, Texas, with a $399 million construction estimate and a November 2027 target. The site is a 525-acre campus Hut 8 describes as AI-focused and planned for up to a gigawatt of capacity, with Jacobs Project Management Co. listed as design firm and American Electric Power and Vertiv Holdings previously named among the project partners.

Under that building sit the numbers that matter. The San Antonio Business Journal, in reporting relayed by Connect CRE, puts a 15-year lease at Beacon Point at 352 megawatts worth at least $9.8 billion, plus a second 15-year lease for the same 352 megawatts with the same tenant — 704 megawatts of contracted capacity and roughly $19.6 billion of contract value. The coverage does not name the tenant. That alone means the demand was underwritten before the steel.

Set the construction estimate against the contracted stream and the real estate nearly vanishes from the trade: $399 million against $19.6 billion of contract value, most of it arriving over the 15-year terms, works out to roughly 2% of the revenue the campus is leased to produce, and about $607 a square foot for the first building. Whoever owns Beacon Point will not be buying Robstown dirt or taking lease-up risk on unproven demand; they will be holding a long-dated credit with a power connection and a delivery schedule attached. The risk that carries this asset is energization timing, construction cost and tenant credit, and absorption barely registers, which is why American Electric Power's place on the partner list says more about the schedule than the design firm's does.

As this publication has argued, data-center capital is shifting construction risk toward public equity, and the pipeline will mark private portfolios down wherever development gets priced like a construction loan. Beacon Point is the counterexample worth holding onto: assets financed against signed 15-year leases ought to trade as infrastructure credit, without a development spread. Concentration is where the caution remains, because both 15-year leases are with the same unnamed tenant, so the full $19.6 billion rests on one counterparty the coverage does not identify — a credit question that belongs in the underwriting before it belongs in the appraisal.

Hut 8 says the campus is planned for up to a gigawatt, and 704 megawatts are spoken for, leaving the balance uncontracted at a site whose power partners are already named. November 2027 decides whether the first building energizes on schedule, and the next lease disclosure is the one to read for whether Beacon Point signs a second name.