HIVE Digital's subsidiary BUZZ HPC has signed a three-year sovereign AI GPU cloud contract valued at roughly $220 million. The deal, framed as part of Canada's push to keep compute capacity and data within national borders, involves 2,304 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs. Once fully deployed, it is expected to add about $70 million in annual recurring revenue.
A $220 million compute commitment
The contract locks in BUZZ HPC to provide GPU compute services over three years. The bulk of the value comes from the hardware and operational commitments. BUZZ HPC will deploy the Blackwell GPUs, which are among NVIDIA's latest AI chips, to handle large-scale training and inference workloads. The $70 million annual recurring revenue figure gives a rough sense of the run rate once the infrastructure is live.
Canada's sovereign AI play
Partners in the project include Bell Canada, Cohere, and Hypertec, all working under a broader Bell AI Fabric initiative. The sovereign AI framing means the compute and data stay on Canadian soil, avoiding cross-border data flows that can raise privacy and security concerns. For Ottawa, the deal is a concrete step toward building domestic AI infrastructure rather than relying on U.S. cloud providers.
From Bitcoin to Blackwell
HIVE Digital started as a pure-play Bitcoin miner. Over the past couple of years it has shifted hard into high-performance computing and AI, leveraging power contracts and data-center expertise it originally built for mining rigs. This contract is one of the largest public signs of that pivot. The company is not alone — several other former mining firms are chasing AI compute deals, but HIVE's focus on a sovereign government-adjacent project sets it apart.
The risk side of the deal
The contract comes with real exposure. GPU procurement is a bottleneck across the industry, and any delays in getting the Blackwell units could push back revenue. Uptime commitments mean BUZZ HPC needs to keep the infrastructure running at high availability, which is capital-intensive. Customer concentration is another risk — a single large contract like this leaves HIVE exposed if Bell Canada or the consortium scales back. The company will need to keep adding clients to diversify.
Deployment timelines haven't been disclosed beyond the three-year term. With Blackwell GPUs still ramping up supply, the speed of rollout will be one to watch.
