HIVE Stock Jumps on $220M Bell and Cohere AI Deal

HIVE BUZZ HPC Contract Adds $70M ARR

HIVE said BUZZ HPC executed a three-year GPU cloud contract with a total value of approximately $220 million. The company said the deployment is expected to add about $70 million in contracted annual recurring revenue, pushing its contracted HPC revenue above $100 million.

The infrastructure details are unusually specific for a miner-AI announcement. HIVE said the deployment will use 2,304 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs in GB200 NVL72 rack-scale systems, interconnected with NVIDIA Quantum InfiniBand networking and built to NVIDIA reference architecture standards.

The cluster is planned for Bell’s facility in Merritt, British Columbia. HIVE said BUZZ HPC’s sovereign cloud will provide the high-performance compute layer on which Cohere will run enterprise AI and foundation-model workloads for Canadian customers.

The geography is part of the selling point. Sovereign AI usually means data, compute and operational control stay inside a country’s legal and infrastructure perimeter. HIVE said the compute infrastructure will remain inside Canada and operate under Canadian standards.

The contract also gives Cohere a local infrastructure story as AI customers become more sensitive to where data is processed. For HIVE, that is a more bankable claim than simply saying AI demand is high. The company is naming the customer path and the site.

Bitcoin Miner AI Pivot Gets A Live Test

HIVE’s legacy business still matters. In its fiscal 2026 results, the company reported total revenue of $297.8 million, with $278.3 million from digital currency mining and $19.5 million from HPC hosting services.

That split shows why the contract is a strategic marker, not a full transformation by itself. Mining still dominated revenue for the year ended March 31, 2026, even though HIVE said BUZZ HPC revenue rose 94% from the prior year.

HIVE also reported 2,885 bitcoin mined during fiscal 2026 and installed hashrate of 25.1 EH/s as of March 31. Those figures keep the company exposed to Bitcoin price, network difficulty and power prices, the same operational pressures that have pushed miners to look at AI and high-performance computing.

The HIVE deal also lands after the broader mining sector was forced to prove that AI announcements can survive weak crypto prices. The recent hashrate shock during winter storms showed how quickly power conditions can hit miners, while AI data centers add stricter uptime, cooling and customer-service demands.

That makes execution the core issue. A miner can have land, substations and cheap power, but an AI cloud customer needs a different service layer: GPUs, networking, cooling, reliability, software orchestration and support.

HIVE is trying to bridge that gap through BUZZ HPC rather than only repurposing mining rigs. The contract gives the company a chance to show whether a Bitcoin miner can behave like an AI infrastructure operator at enterprise scale.

Bell And Cohere Deal Raises Funding Stakes

The money behind the buildout matters because AI factories are capital intensive. HIVE said it is funding the NVIDIA Grace Blackwell systems using part of the proceeds from a recent $115 million convertible note financing completed in April.

In that Newsfile financing release, HIVE said the notes carry a 0% coupon, mature in 2031 and produced estimated net proceeds of about $109.5 million before the cost of capped-call transactions. The company said proceeds would support general corporate purposes, capital investment, GPU purchases and data-center development.

That financing gives HIVE a partial answer to the capital gap question, but not a complete one. The company still has larger AI ambitions, including a 320 MW Greater Toronto Area project that it has described as a major Canadian AI gigafactory target.

The terms also introduce shareholder questions. Exchangeable notes can reduce cash interest burden, but they can still dilute equity if the stock price rises enough and the company settles exchanges partly or fully in shares. HIVE said capped-call transactions were designed to mitigate potential dilution up to an initial cap price of about $4.92 per share.

The deal sits next to another infrastructure trend Daily Crypto Briefs has tracked: crypto companies moving from tokens into payments, data centers and real-world distribution. HIVE’s version is physical and capital heavy, closer to an industrial buildout than to a new onchain protocol.

Sentiment remains fragile across crypto markets. Alternative.me’s Crypto Fear and Greed Index printed 15, or Extreme Fear, on June 18, with bitcoin still below mid-May levels.

What remains unknown is the final deployment timing, actual utilization, margins after power and depreciation, and whether the project goes live inside HIVE’s late-2026 to early-2027 window. The next checkpoints are GPU delivery, Bell facility commissioning, Cohere workload ramp and HIVE’s next earnings update showing whether contracted ARR is turning into reported revenue.