Hive Digital Soars 26% as Bitcoin Miner Leans Into 320MW Ontario AI Data Center

Investors rewarded power optionality on Monday. Shares of Hive Digital Technologies jumped 26% to about $3.39 and briefly spiked to $3.92 before the bell—its highest mark this year—pushing year-to-date gains over 35% at the peak. The trigger: a sweeping buildout in Ontario that reframes the Bitcoin miner as an AI infrastructure operator rather than a pure hash producer.

Hive’s subsidiary, Buzz High Performance Computing, plans a roughly 320-megawatt data center in the Greater Toronto Area, positioned as “sovereign” capacity that keeps compute and data local to Canada. When fully deployed, the site is designed to host vertically integrated AI supercomputers and is expected to rank among the country’s largest. The company targets the second half of next year for initial operations, a timeline that will call for roughly 800 construction workers. Estimated cost: about C$3.5 billion (US$2.55 billion).

Put in context, 320MW is enough electricity for at least 200,000 average homes. If completed as outlined, the Ontario addition would bring Hive’s total global power capacity to 850MW, up from 450MW currently energizing its data centers. The company says its land and power pipeline could support around 130,000 GPUs, a figure that resonates in an environment where high-end accelerators remain constrained.

This is the logical extension of a pivot Hive began in 2022 away from a single-threaded Bitcoin mining model. The financials illustrate the bridge: in the quarter ended Dec. 31, Hive generated $88.2 million from digital asset mining versus $26.6 million a year prior, while high-performance computing brought in $4.8 million compared to $2.5 million—still a small slice of the pie. The balance sheet shows the same shift. As of Dec. 31, Hive held 481 BTC, recently valued around $36.7 million at roughly $76,300 per Bitcoin, down from 2,805 BTC a year earlier—a stash that would be worth about $214.5 million today.

What the market appears to be pricing is not today’s revenue mix but the strategic value of long-duration power, real estate, and permitting in tier-one grids. In AI, those inputs are scarcer than capital. If Hive executes, the ability to convert megawatts into useful, Canadian-domiciled compute could command premium, multi-year contracts from model builders and enterprises seeking locality, latency, and data residency. Vertical integration matters here: owning the stack reduces coordination risk and can compress deployment timelines, especially if GPU procurement and cooling are tightly engineered from day one.

There are frictions. A 320MW load will attract community and regulatory scrutiny at a time when North American residents are increasingly wary of data centers driving up electricity rates. Hive says the Ontario campus will minimize water consumption via closed-loop cooling, an important design decision as municipalities reassess data center impact. Power sourcing, grid interconnection, and clarity on incremental generation versus load-shifting will shape the project’s social license and ultimately its cost of capital.

From an investor psychology standpoint, miners embracing AI compute are tapping a familiar narrative: repurpose existing infrastructure to chase higher-margin workloads. That can work, but it shifts the business from largely commodity hash economics to enterprise compute services with different sales cycles, uptime SLAs, and customer concentration risks. The C$3.5 billion build is a bold bet; revenue from HPC today is a sliver, and scaling to justify 130,000 GPUs requires disciplined go-to-market and supply chain execution.

Frank Holmes, Executive Chairman of Hive and Buzz, framed the move as enabling domestic leadership by keeping intelligence and processing inside Canada. If the team hits its H2 next-year milestone and lands anchor tenants, the stock’s AI premium has room. If procurement, power pricing, or community pushback slow progress, the multiple can compress quickly. In a game where megawatts are the new oil, Hive just staked a large claim. Now comes the hard part: turning capacity into durable, contracted cash flows without losing the efficiency muscle it built in Bitcoin mining.