For years, bitcoin miners operated on a single logic: build data centers, keep machines running, convert electricity into block rewards. HIVE Digital is now testing a different calculation. The company just signed a three-year, $220 million contract to supply GPU cloud infrastructure for Canada's sovereign AI push — a bet that the data center expertise miners accumulated translates into something more durable than mining margins.
The deal runs through BUZZ HPC, HIVE's high-performance computing subsidiary. On the other side: Bell Canada, the country's largest telecom operator, contributing a purpose-built facility in Merritt, British Columbia, and national connectivity; and Cohere, the Canadian enterprise AI company whose language models run inside Oracle, Salesforce, and a wide roster of Fortune 500 deployments. At the hardware layer: 2,304 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs in NVL72 rack-scale configurations, interconnected via Quantum InfiniBand and liquid-cooled. These are the chips Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are competing to lock up.
"Sovereign AI" is the framework driving the contract. Canada, like France, the UAE, and Germany, has made a policy decision that critical government and enterprise AI workloads should stay on domestic soil rather than route through U.S. hyperscaler infrastructure. BUZZ HPC fills that slot: GPU capacity inside Canadian borders, operated by a Canadian entity, with data residency guarantees that government buyers increasingly require.
The contract reshapes HIVE's revenue profile. The company currently books roughly $35 million in annual recurring HPC revenue. The Bell-Cohere deployment is projected to add $70 million in ARR once systems go live, expected between late 2026 and early 2027, pushing total contracted HPC revenue above $100 million. Shares jumped 10% the day the deal was announced. HIVE also closed on a 32-megawatt data center acquisition in Boden, Sweden, extending its AI compute presence into Europe.
The miner-to-AI-cloud pivot has circulated as a narrative for a few years, usually with more ambition than signed contracts behind it. HIVE's deal is different in that it names the counterparties, specifies the hardware, and locks in a three-year revenue horizon. For mining operators still evaluating the same move, the practical question is whether they can fund Blackwell procurement and secure long-term enterprise buyers before a new wave of AI compute capacity hits the market later this year.
