Hive Blockchain Technologies shares rose 10% on Thursday after the company announced a $220 million GPU cloud contract with Bell Canada and AI firm Cohere. The deal will supply computing power for Canada's sovereign AI infrastructure — a project that aims to keep sensitive data and model training on home soil. The jump pushed HIVE's market cap past $1.2 billion and reinforced a strategic shift that investors have been watching for months.
What the contract covers
Under the agreement, HIVE will install and operate a large cluster of Nvidia GPUs at Bell's data centers. Cohere, the Toronto-based AI company behind the Command and Embed models, will use the capacity to train and run its large language models. Bell is providing the network, colocation, and customer relationship. The contract runs for multiple years, though exact terms were not disclosed. The $220 million figure is the total estimated value over the contract's lifetime.
HIVE's pivot picks up speed
HIVE started as a bitcoin miner, but over the past two years it has been converting its facilities to host GPU hardware for AI workloads. The shift isn't cheap — retrofitting a mining data center for high-density compute takes time and cash. But the Bell-Cohere deal is the company's largest single customer win to date. It signals that HIVE can compete with established cloud providers like CoreWeave and Lambda on price and geography. The company now generates more revenue from AI services than from bitcoin mining, according to its most recent quarterly filing.
Why sovereign AI matters
Canada's government has been pushing for domestic AI infrastructure since early 2025, worried about data flowing to U.S. hyperscalers and the risk of service disruptions. The Bell-Cohere-HIVE project is part of that push. Cohere's models are already used by Canadian banks and government agencies. Running them on Canadian soil — with Bell's network and HIVE's GPUs — lets customers meet data residency requirements without sacrificing performance. The deal also gives HIVE a strong foothold if other provinces or federal agencies mandate sovereign compute.
HIVE expects to start deploying hardware this quarter and have the cluster operational by the end of the year. The company is also in talks with other potential customers for similar arrangements, executives said on the earnings call. The stock's 10% gain on Thursday suggests the market is betting that this deal is a template, not a one-off.
