HIVE, a publicly traded cryptocurrency miner, has signed a five-year artificial intelligence cloud services agreement valued at $350 million through its BUZZ HPC subsidiary, the company announced August 17. The contract is projected to deliver $70 million in annualized revenue to HIVE once fully deployed.
The deal marks a shift in how large-scale bitcoin miners are monetizing excess or idle computational capacity. Rather than dedicating all hardware to mining, operators are increasingly leasing infrastructure to AI training firms and data centers seeking high-performance compute at competitive rates. HIVE did not disclose the customer's identity, citing contractual confidentiality, but described it as an investment-grade enterprise.
BUZZ HPC, HIVE's cloud infrastructure arm, was established to serve exactly this market. Bitcoin mining operations run 24/7 and require immense GPU and processing power, creating infrastructure that can be repurposed for AI workloads during periods of lower mining profitability or to supplement mining revenue. The structure allows miners to stabilize cash flow by contracting out capacity to longer-term customers with predictable demand.
The $350 million contract over five years equals $70 million per year on a straight basis, though deployment schedules and pricing escalation clauses may create variation across the term. For context, HIVE reported total revenue of approximately $112 million in 2025, making this contract potentially material to annual cash generation once live.
Other major miners have pursued similar strategies. Core Scientific has signed data center and AI infrastructure contracts; Marathon Digital and Riot Platforms have both explored cloud service offerings as bitcoin mining margins compressed in 2024 and 2025. The spread of these arrangements stems from both miner need to diversify income and genuine scarcity of inference-grade GPU capacity in the broader market.
HIVE's customer remains unnamed, but the investment-grade designation points to an institutional buyer with stable funding and multi-year budget certainty. That profile contrasts sharply with earlier AI cloud buyers, many of which were early-stage startups with volatile funding timelines. The five-year term locks both parties into a relationship expected to survive potential shifts in either mining or AI markets over that horizon.
A contract of this size spreading $70 million annually across five years represents one of the largest disclosed cloud agreements between a miner and an AI customer to date, though others may exist under confidentiality. The question now is whether HIVE can fill additional capacity at similar or better terms, or whether this client commands premium pricing due to the relationship's early stage.
