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Seeking Alpha 2026-02-27 15:39:40

Hut 8: The Energy Story Is Real, But The Earnings Aren't There Yet

Summary Hut 8 Corp. trades at a premium, pricing in digital infrastructure earnings not yet realized in financials. Compute revenue more than doubled in 2025, but the power segment—central to the infrastructure thesis—contracted, raising questions about diversification progress. Signed long-term contracts with Google and Anthropic de-risk the pipeline, yet material income from these deals won't appear until 2027. I maintain a Hold rating: near-term earnings remain volatile and Bitcoin-dependent, while premium valuation demands flawless execution and Bitcoin resilience. Introduction Hut 8 Corp. ( HUT ) is being valued as if its transformation into a digital infrastructure platform is already complete. It isn't. The company has made genuine progress. It has signed contracts, developed a credible energy pipeline, and achieved compute revenue that more than doubled in fiscal 2025. The stock, however, trades at roughly three times the forward EV/EBITDA multiple of its large-cap mining peers, implying that structural diversification has already shown up in earnings. The Revenue Picture Hut 8 posted 45% year-over-year revenue growth in fiscal 2025 , with total revenue reaching $235.1 million. That puts it in the middle of the large-cap mining peer group . According to Seeking Alpha figures, Riot Platforms, Inc. ( RIOT ) posted 103.6% over the same period. MARA Holdings, Inc. ( MARA ) came in at 53.5%. That would be unremarkable if forward profitability was above peers, but Hut 8 is expected to post approximately -14% forward EBITDA growth. Riot stands at 11.7%, and Marathon is at 15.6%. Mid-tier revenue growth and negative forward EBITDA growth at a premium multiple are the main issues here. Valued For Future Income The valuation gap between Hut 8 and its peers is substantial. The stock trades at 24.7x trailing sales versus 8.9x for Riot and 3.2x for Marathon, and at 31.5x forward EV/EBITDA, roughly three times both peers. Even on a forward EV/sales basis, Hut 8 sits at 16.5x compared with 10.5x for Riot and 6.3x for Marathon. Those multiples price in infrastructure earnings that have yet to contribute significantly to the income statement. With negative forward EBITDA growth, the burden of proof rests on execution rather than current financial performance. What The Income Statement Actually Shows The headline numbers for fiscal 2025 aren’t great, with a net loss of $248 million and an Adjusted EBITDA loss of $135.4 million, compared to net income of $331.4 million and Adjusted EBITDA of $555.7 million in 2024. However, the swing was driven largely by a $220 million unrealized mark-to-market loss on Bitcoin holdings, reversing a $509.3 million gain the prior year. Strip out the mark-to-market change, and the picture is considerably less bleak. Gross margin expanded from 47% to 54%. Q4 2025 revenues grew 179% year-over-year with gross margin expanding from 36% to 60%. The underlying operational trajectory is improving. The reported bottom line simply doesn't reflect it clearly. That is precisely the problem for anyone trying to support the valuation. As long as Hut 8 holds a significant Bitcoin treasury and mining remains the dominant earnings driver, reported EBITDA will continue to move with the Bitcoin price rather than with operational progress. Computing Up, Power Down The segment mix in 2025 is showing signs of transition. Compute revenue more than doubled to $202.3 million from $80.7 million, driven by ASIC colocation and the Highrise AI GPU cloud business. Compute now accounts for most of the total revenue. Power revenue, meanwhile, declined to $23.2 million from $56.6 million, reflecting the termination of the Ionic Digital managed services agreement. The compute growth is solid. But the power segment, which is central to the long-term thesis of owning and monetizing energy infrastructure, actually contracted in fiscal 2025. Management attributes this to the Ionic termination rather than structural weakness, and that explanation is plausible. But investors need to see power revenue grow, not shrink, for the infrastructure thesis to gain credibility. A company positioning itself as an energy infrastructure platform should, at some point, show growing energy revenue. The Contracts Are Signed To be fair to the bull case, recent news on the infrastructure side is genuinely encouraging. In Q4 2025, Hut 8 signed a 15-year lease for 245 megawatts of AI data center capacity at its River Bend campus, valued at $7 billion, with payments financially backstopped by Google. The company also signed a deal to build an AI data center in Louisiana for Anthropic, with Fluidstack operating the high-performance clusters, a deal management expects to generate roughly $454 million in net operating income annually over the base term. However, income from these deals is not expected to materialize until 2027. These are not vague pipeline announcements. They are signed agreements with creditworthy counterparties. The 8,500-megawatt development pipeline now has real anchors behind it. That said, signed contracts and recognized net operating income are two different things. The River Bend and Anthropic deals are meaningful de-risking events for the bull case, but they don't resolve the near-term earnings picture. What matters now is execution: whether the infrastructure earnings start flowing through the income statement on schedule and at the margins management has guided to. Until it does, the valuation is still running way ahead of the financials. The Sideways Bitcoin Problem If Bitcoin trades sideways from current levels for an extended period, Hut 8's negative forward EBITDA growth becomes even more difficult to reconcile with a 31.5x forward EV/EBITDA multiple. Post-halving, the operating leverage cuts both ways. Reduced block rewards mean margins are more sensitive to Bitcoin price movements than in prior cycles. The cost to mine one Bitcoin has effectively doubled in reward terms since April 2024. Current margins are holding up because the Bitcoin price has been elevated. Flat Bitcoin means the expansion that would justify the forward multiple simply doesn't arrive. Layer in the mark-to-market dynamics, and the picture gets worse. Flat Bitcoin means no unrealized gain tailwind on treasury holdings. A 20% Bitcoin decline would amplify the problem. Operating leverage works in reverse. EBITDA compresses faster than revenue. Treasury mark-to-market adds downside to already weak reported earnings. Risks And Catalysts The primary downside risk is Bitcoin price weakness combined with negative forward EBITDA growth at an elevated multiple. Multiple compression from current levels could be significant even without operational deterioration. Delays or cost overruns on the development pipeline would compound the problem. The most meaningful catalysts are concrete: River Bend and the Anthropic deal beginning to contribute real earnings, power segment recovery, and greater segment disclosure that isolates recurring infrastructure earnings from mining volatility. Cleaner reporting would itself support valuation stability. Right now, the two are too tangled together to give the market clarity. Conclusion Hut 8 has made genuine progress. The near-term challenge is that reported earnings remain volatile and Bitcoin-dependent, the power segment contracted in 2025, and the stock trades at a substantial premium across every key valuation metric. The infrastructure income is coming, but is not yet reflected at scale. Until then, the premium valuation requires investors to carry both Bitcoin cyclicality and development execution risk simultaneously, which may be asking a lot. I maintain a Hold rating.

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