HIVE Signs $220M AI Cloud Deal With Bell, Cohere for Canadian Sovereign Stack

HIVE Digital (NASDAQ: HIVE)’s high-performance computing unit has signed a three-year GPU cloud contract valued at about $220 million, expanding the bitcoin miner’s push into AI infrastructure through a Canadian sovereign cloud partnership with Bell Canada and Cohere.

The deal, announced Thursday, will see HIVE’s BUZZ High Performance Computing deploy 2,304 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs at Bell’s AI Fabric facility in Merritt, British Columbia. The systems will be part of Nvidia GB200 NVL72 rack-scale infrastructure connected through Nvidia Quantum InfiniBand networking and built to Nvidia reference architecture standards, according to the company.

HIVE said it will fund the GPU purchase with part of the proceeds from its $115 million convertible note financing completed in April. Hypertec, a Canadian high-performance computing equipment maker and integrator, will handle hardware procurement, system integration, installation, commissioning and OEM support.

The deployment is designed to provide the compute layer for Cohere’s foundation models and enterprise AI products serving Canadian government and corporate customers. HIVE said the infrastructure will remain inside Canada and operate under Canadian standards, positioning the project as part of a broader effort to keep sensitive AI data, models and compute capacity under domestic control.

For HIVE, the contract marks one of its largest commercial wins since the company began repositioning parts of its infrastructure portfolio beyond bitcoin mining and into AI and high-performance computing. The company said the Nvidia GB200 deployment is expected to go live from late 2026 to early 2027 and add about $70 million in contracted annual recurring revenue. That would come on top of what HIVE described as about $35 million of current realized ARR, taking its contracted HPC revenue target beyond $100 million.

The agreement builds on an existing relationship between BUZZ HPC and Bell AI Fabric. Bell in March said BUZZ had secured 6.5 megawatts of gross capacity, or 5 megawatts of critical IT power, at the Merritt facility as part of Bell’s effort to provide sovereign AI infrastructure for enterprise and government customers. Bell has described AI Fabric as a full-stack platform combining its fibre network, data centres, cloud capabilities, software, cybersecurity and partner ecosystem.

Cohere, one of Canada’s best-known AI companies, previously partnered with Bell to provide sovereign AI services for government and enterprise customers. The new arrangement adds a dedicated Nvidia Grace Blackwell compute layer to that stack, linking Bell’s infrastructure and connectivity with Cohere’s enterprise AI models and BUZZ’s GPU cloud operations.

The project also comes as Canada moves to increase domestic AI compute capacity. The federal government’s sovereign AI compute strategy has called for expanding commercial AI data centres, supporting Canadian AI companies and building public supercomputing infrastructure to reduce reliance on foreign-controlled compute.

The contract adds to a broader shift among bitcoin miners that are trying to monetize power capacity, data centre sites and operational experience for AI workloads. While mining remains a core business for many of these companies, investors have increasingly rewarded operators that can convert energy and infrastructure assets into long-term AI or high-performance computing revenue.

HIVE has been among the miners making that transition while continuing to operate bitcoin mining facilities powered largely by renewable energy. Earlier Thursday, the company also announced municipal approval for its acquisition of the 32-megawatt Big Boden data center in Sweden, a site that has anchored its Swedish operations since 2018.

The Bell-Cohere contract gives HIVE a clearer path to recurring AI cloud revenue, but execution risks remain. The company still has to procure, integrate and bring the GB200 systems online on schedule, while demand for sovereign AI infrastructure must translate into sustained customer usage. The project also depends on the broader enterprise and government market for secure domestic AI services, a market that is growing but still developing.