Dec 17 (Reuters) - Hut 8 HUT.O has signed a deal valued at about $7 billion to lease a data center in Louisiana, it said on Wednesday, as former cryptocurrency miners pivot to meet surging demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Its shares rose 21% in premarket trading, adding to the roughly 80% jump this year.

The company will sign a 15-year lease agreement to develop a 245-megawatt data center in the River Bend campus. Construction of the first phase is expected to be completed by early 2027.

The transition from crypto mining to AI hosting has become a key trend for firms like Hut 8, CoreWeave, and Applied Digital that are repurposing their access to high-voltage power, cooling systems and specialized real estate. These assets are increasingly scarce as AI developers race to deploy Nvidia NVDA.O graphics processing units and other essential hardware.

Hut 8, once a pure-play bitcoin miner, has spent the last year repositioning itself as an energy infrastructure platform.

The new deal involves partnerships with AI model developer Anthropic and infrastructure provider Fluidstack. Alphabet-owned GOOGL.O Google is providing a financial backstop for the 15-year term, a move that highlights major cloud providers' urgency to secure capacity for power-intensive AI technologies.

The agreement is also part of a broader collaboration between Hut 8 and Anthropic that could eventually scale to 2.3 gigawatts of capacity. Last month, Anthropic announced a $50 billion investment to build data centers alongside Fluidstack.

Hut 8 said last month that it had a total power pipeline of 8.65 gigawatts, ranging from early-stage site diligence to 1.53 gigawatts of late-stage projects under active development.

(Reporting by Akash Sriram in Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)

((Akash.Sriram@thomsonreuters.com; On X as @HoodieOnVeshti; +91-99017-77617;))