• BUZZ HPC's five-year $350m agreement covers a dedicated cluster of 2,016 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs at Bell AI Fabric in Merritt
  • HIVE targets Q4 2026 deployment, expects about $70m in annualised revenue and estimates project capex at roughly $185m

The fact

HIVE Digital Technologies said its BUZZ HPC subsidiary has signed a five-year GPU cloud services agreement worth approximately $350m with an unnamed investment-grade enterprise customer. HIVE expects the contract to add about $70m in annualised revenue.

BUZZ will deploy 2,016 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs in GB300 NVL72 systems at Bell's AI Fabric facility in Merritt, British Columbia. HIVE expects the cluster to become operational in the fourth quarter of 2026. Bell said earlier this year that BUZZ had secured 6.5MW of gross capacity at the Merritt facility.

HIVE estimates the deployment will require about $185m of capital expenditure. The customer will provide an upfront deposit of approximately $35m, while HIVE will retain ownership of the GPU infrastructure. HIVE says BUZZ currently has about $35m of active annualised revenue and a further $145m of contracted annualised revenue expected to come online through Q4 2026.

The assessment

BUZZ had already secured data-centre capacity at Bell's Merritt facility. The new agreement gives it a five-year customer for a 2,016-GPU cluster at that site. With the customer commitment in place, BUZZ now has to finance, install and commission the hardware by Q4 before the service can begin.

The roughly $35m customer deposit covers only part of the estimated $185m project cost. HIVE will retain ownership of the GPUs and must fund the rest of the deployment through its own capital and financing arrangements. The $350m figure is the value of the five-year service contract, not revenue already earned, and it does not indicate how profitable the project will be.

For BTW readers, the distinction is between contracted demand and operating revenue. HIVE says BUZZ has about $145m of annualised revenue contracted for activation through Q4, compared with about $35m active today. The Merritt contract starts contributing to that active base only after the cluster is commissioned and customer billing begins.

What to watch

Watch for delivery of the 2,016 GPUs, installation and commissioning at Merritt, and the date BUZZ begins billing the customer. A delay beyond the Q4 target would push back the start of the roughly $70m in annualised revenue expected from the contract. HIVE's financing disclosures should also clarify how it is funding the remaining project cost after the customer deposit.