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HIVE Digital Technologies stock climbed more than 7% on Thursday after the company announced a $220 million GPU cloud contract with Bell Canada and Toronto-based AI firm Cohere—its biggest deal yet and the clearest sign to date that the Bitcoin miner is now firmly in the AI infrastructure business.
The contract runs three years and is delivered through HIVE's subsidiary, BUZZ High Performance Computing. It involves 2,304 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs—chips designed for frontier AI model training and inference—installed at Bell's purpose-built data center in Merritt, British Columbia.
Cohere, a large language model company that builds AI systems for enterprises and governments, will use that compute layer to run its platform for Canadian clients.
The term "sovereign AI" gets thrown around a lot. In plain terms, it means AI that runs on infrastructure inside your country's borders, on locally controlled data—which matters a lot when the clients are government agencies. Canada has pushed hard on this, with Ottawa committing over $2 billion to domestic AI compute as part of its Sovereign AI Compute Strategy and putting $240 million directly into Cohere. This deal is the physical layer of that bet.
Cohere is a fitting anchor for the arrangement. The Toronto company is one of the few anywhere building foundation models—the base-layer AI that powers enterprise chatbots, government document processing, and everything in between—and recently announced a merger with Germany's Aleph Alpha that values the combined company at roughly $20 billion. Bell and Cohere had an existing partnership dating to July 2025; this contract is the compute infrastructure underneath it.
"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"
For HIVE, which reported $278.3M Bitcoin mining revenue in its last quarter, this is the latest chapter in a pivot underway since 2022.
The company began its AI shift by redirecting GPU capacity from crypto mining, landing a deal with Dell for new GPUs last November and closing a $115 million convertible note offering in April to fund hardware purchases. It's not alone: Keel Infrastructure, formerly Bitfarms, sold off its last Paraguay mining facility in April and is running the same playbook.
Crypto mining returns are volatile and get harder as more miners compete for block rewards. Things get even harder during crypto winters, downturns in the market, as rewards become increasingly less attractive as the price of crypto assets go down but costs stay the same or go up.
On the opposite side, AI compute demand is growing fast and clients—especially government agencies—sign multi-year contracts at locked-in rates. Trading one bubble for another, maybe, but at least this one has a government mandate behind it.
Once the deployment goes live—expected between late 2026 and early 2027—HIVE expects roughly $70 million in new annual recurring revenue on top of the $35 million it already books from existing GPU operations. Its contracted HPC revenue target now exceeds $100 million.
The company also has a larger project in the works: a 320-megawatt AI data center in the Greater Toronto Area designed to house more than 100,000 Nvidia GPUs at full build-out.
HIVE expects the facility to generate roughly $360 million in annualized recurring revenue at full operation and has set a broader target of $660 million in annualized HPC revenue by the end of 2028.
