HIVE swaps hashrate for hot chips: $220M Cohere deal makes AI the new block reward 🇨🇦

HIVE Digital Technologies said its BUZZ HPC subsidiary has signed a three-year GPU cloud contract worth approximately $220 million with Bell AI Fabric to provide compute infrastructure for AI startup Cohere, marking the Canadian Bitcoin miner's largest AI infrastructure commitment to date. Under the agreement, BUZZ HPC will deploy 2,304 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs at a Bell Canada data center in British Columbia, where the infrastructure will support Cohere's artificial intelligence models and services for enterprise and government customers. Once operational, HIVE expects the project to contribute about $70 million in contracted annual recurring revenue, lifting its contracted HPC revenue target above $100 million, according to the company.

The deal builds on a partnership between Bell and Cohere dating to July 2025 and aligns with Canada's Sovereign AI Compute Strategy, under which Ottawa has committed more than $2 billion to domestic AI compute and invested $240 million directly in Cohere. Cohere recently announced a merger with Germany's Aleph Alpha that values the combined company at roughly $20 billion. "Canada helped pioneer modern artificial intelligence. What we have lacked is not talent, it is industrial infrastructure to commercialize that talent at scale before others do it for us," Frank Holmes, executive chairman at HIVE Digital Technologies, said in a statement. "This partnership with Bell and Cohere is a defining moment. BUZZ HPC is the GPU factory layer that transforms Canada's AI ambitions from political promises into productive national assets."

HIVE will fund the GPU purchases using proceeds from the $115 million convertible note financing it completed in April. The company reported $278.3 million in Bitcoin mining revenue in its last quarter, while HPC revenue climbed to $19.5 million in fiscal 2026, nearly doubling year-over-year, with contracted annual recurring revenue from the HPC division reaching $35 million. In May, BUZZ HPC outlined plans for a 320-megawatt AI data center campus near Toronto capable of supporting more than 100,000 GPUs. Earlier this month, the company also reported that its Bitcoin ($BTC) treasury holdings fell to 150 $BTC from 481 $BTC a quarter earlier, according to BitcoinTreasuries.NET.

HIVE stock climbed more than 7% on Thursday and was up almost 24% over the past month, according to Yahoo Finance data. The CoinShares Bitcoin Mining ETF (WGMI), for which HIVE is the eighth-biggest holding, gained 5.4% on the day and more than 30% for the month. On June 14, Bitcoin mining difficulty fell 10.09%, one of the largest downward adjustments in network history, with The Energy Mag attributing the decline to weaker mining economics, $BTC's price decline, seasonal power curtailment in Texas and broader power-market dynamics.