Tim Gray
Bitzero Holdings just signed a binding 15-year lease worth roughly $2.6 billion, turning a little-known Bitcoin miner into a contracted AI infrastructure operator overnight. The deal hands OneQode the full 110 megawatts at Bitzero's site in Namsskogan, Norway, and reframes the company as a power landlord for the AI era.
At a Glance
- In May 2026, Bitzero (NASDAQ:AIBZ) inked a binding letter with OneQode for a 15-year lease of 110 MW in Norway, totaling about $2.6 billion.
- The lease implies roughly $178 million in annual revenue at full capacity, with an 85% net operating margin.
- Bitzero owns its power as a licensed Norwegian grid operator, delivering electricity at 3-4 cents per kilowatt-hour.
- The company controls more than 1 gigawatt of potential capacity across four sites in Norway, Finland and North Dakota.
- Despite the deal, Bitzero's market cap sits near $339 million, a fraction of peers like IREN and TeraWulf.
The AI Bottleneck Is Power, Not Chips
The market has already priced in the obvious winners of the AI race. Software is spoken for. Chips are spoken for. What remains undervalued is the thing every model actually runs on: electricity, and specifically who controls it, where it sits, and how cheaply it reaches the rack.
The grid was never designed for this load. A single ChatGPT query draws around ten times the energy of a Google search. Training the next wave of large models eats power on the scale of a small city. And Bitcoin mining, by itself, already burns more electricity than some entire nations.
Industry research from Goldman Sachs estimates global data center power demand will climb roughly 50% by 2027 and could swell as much as 165% by the end of the decade against a 2023 baseline. Yet the supply side is frozen. Utility companies quote two-to-four-year waits just for feasibility studies. Securing actual power takes longer still, and if your site isn't near a major transmission line, the answer is often a flat no.
Money can't shortcut it. Consider the $12 billion data center complex proposed in St. Joseph County, Indiana, which would have been the largest project investment in state history. The developer had capital, land and the backing of county economic officials hungry for jobs and tax revenue. None of it mattered. In September 2025, the Local Area Plan Commission voted 7-0 against it. The plan would have displaced 16 single-family homes and two farms, and residents packed the room over water, electricity, tax and safety concerns.
Why Bitzero's Position Is Hard to Copy
Norway has effectively shut the door on newcomers. Any new operator without existing infrastructure is capped at an initial 5 MW allocation, barely enough to run a modest mining setup, let alone bid for AI workloads. That makes the operators who already hold their connections owners of something close to irreplaceable.
Bitzero is one of them. The company functions as a licensed grid operator at the 132 kV level, which means it skips the utilities entirely. It owns its high-voltage feed lines, runs its own substations and connects directly to hydroelectric plants. When it wants to expand, it talks to the power plant, not a queue of intermediaries.
That structure produces an all-in electricity cost of 3-4 cents per kilowatt-hour once grid fees, taxes and every charge are counted. Conventional data center operators pay 8 to 12 cents. The gap drives a Bitcoin mining breakeven near $50,000 per coin, roughly half the industry average of $100,000.
What hyperscalers want and rarely find
AI tenants need a precise and increasingly scarce mix: 100 MW or more of immediately available power, renewable supply to satisfy ESG pledges from Microsoft, Google and Amazon, low-latency fiber, a cold climate to slash cooling costs, and a politically stable jurisdiction with strong data protections. Norway, Finland and the Nordics check every box. Access to them does not exist for new entrants. Bitzero already has the access.
Inside the OneQode Lease
The OneQode agreement, signed with OneQode Networks Pte. Ltd., commits the entire 110 MW Namsskogan site to a 15-year term. Contracted revenue runs about $2.6 billion, with implied annual revenue near $178 million at full capacity and an 85% net operating margin. The tenant will deploy GPU clusters for enterprise AI, large language model training and sovereign AI workloads. Initial commissioning targets the first half of 2027, with the lease running through at least 2042.
Two figures explain the significance. Bitzero currently books about $25 million in trailing twelve-month revenue from mining. Once OneQode commences, pro forma revenue reaches roughly $203 million, an eightfold jump. The second figure is quality. Per CoinShares Q1 2026 research, miners with secured HPC contracts trade near 12.3x forward sales, while pure-play miners sit closer to 5.9x. Bitzero is stepping across that gap.
The fat 85% margin exists because Bitzero is the landlord, not the operator. OneQode pays for power on top of the rent, runs the GPUs and carries the technology risk. Bitzero collects rent on infrastructure it already owns and powers at rock-bottom rates. The buildout to HPC-grade specs costs roughly $1.1 billion, and the company is in late-stage talks with banks for debt financing. The binding letter still needs definitive documentation, which management expects to close within 60 to 90 days.
How it stacks up against peer deals
| Company | HPC / Contract Deal |
|---|---|
| TeraWulf | ~$12.8 billion in contracted HPC revenue |
| Hut 8 | $7 billion, 15-year lease with Fluidstack (245 MW) |
| Core Scientific | $10.2 billion deal with CoreWeave (~500 MW) |
| Bitzero | $2.6 billion, 15-year lease with OneQode (110 MW) |
Each of those announcements rerated its company's stock. Bitzero's market cap has barely budged.
More Than a Gigawatt Across Four Sites
Bitzero controls over 1 GW of potential capacity, each location aimed at a different slice of the market. Namsskogan is the contracted flagship, with mining continuing until the HPC conversion starts. The Finnish site at Pori spans nearly 1 million square meters, with staged capacity up to 1 GW, a 100% renewable mix led by nuclear and hydro, plus direct access to undersea fiber landing stations. Bitzero retained CBRE to market Pori to hyperscale tenants.
A second Norwegian site at R\u00f8yrvik holds 20 MW of hydroelectric capacity with room to grow. In North Dakota, the 184-acre Nekoma Pyramid property includes the former Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex, a Cold War missile facility with 225,000 square feet of EMP-proof, nuclear-hardened bunker space. It offers 3 MW immediately, expandable to 30 MW within six months, and targets defense contractors and classified AI training work.
The Mining Business Pays the Bills
Unlike early-stage plays that bleed capital for years before a first tenant, Bitzero earns money now. Its Norway mining operation generates about $1 million in monthly EBITDA and keeps running until the OneQode buildout begins. Mining does three things: it proves the infrastructure holds up under continuous full load, it produces immediate revenue, and it gives the company optionality to shift capacity between mining and AI hosting based on which earns more.
The Valuation Disconnect
On a pro forma basis, Bitzero's revenue profile lands it in the company of names with multi-billion-dollar valuations. IREN Limited (Nasdaq: IREN) trades above $22 billion, TeraWulf Inc. (Nasdaq: WULF) above $13 billion, Cipher Mining (Nasdaq: CIFR) north of $10 billion, and Hut 8 (Nasdaq: HUT) above $13 billion. Each built its valuation on owned power plus a long-duration HPC contract, the exact thesis Bitzero is now executing. At the time of writing, Bitzero trades near $339 million, roughly 1% of IREN's market cap.
The broader market is catching on that the AI buildout is an energy story. Quanta Services (NYSE: PWR), which builds and upgrades transmission networks; Vertiv Holdings (NYSE: VRT), a maker of data center power and cooling systems; and Constellation Energy (NASDAQ: CEG), a major supplier of carbon-free baseload power, have all become beneficiaries of the scramble for electricity. AI cannot scale without power.
Bitzero's backers add weight. Phoenix Group, the publicly listed miner ranked tenth globally by market cap, holds a 20.8% stake and a board seat. Kevin O'Leary sits on the cap table, and the proposed board includes investment banking veterans from Credit Suisse and JPMorgan. As of June 9, 2026, the stock trades on Nasdaq under the ticker AIBZ, a move from its prior CSE listing that opens the door to US institutional money.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the OneQode deal include?
OneQode signed a binding letter to lease the entire 110 megawatts at Bitzero's Namsskogan, Norway site for 15 years, with total contracted revenue of about $2.6 billion and commissioning targeted for the first half of 2027.
Why is Bitzero's electricity so cheap?
Bitzero operates as a licensed grid operator at the 132 kV level in Norway, owning its feed lines and substations and connecting directly to hydroelectric plants. That puts its all-in cost at 3-4 cents per kilowatt-hour, versus 8-12 cents for typical operators.
How does Bitzero compare to companies like IREN and Hut 8?
Those peers carry market caps from roughly $10 billion to $22 billion, built on owned power and long-term HPC contracts. Bitzero trades near $339 million while pursuing the same model, though its OneQode lease remains subject to definitive documentation.
Is Bitzero profitable today?
Its Norway Bitcoin mining operation generates around $1 million in monthly EBITDA and will keep running until the HPC conversion for OneQode begins.
What Comes Next
The pieces that matter are the Nasdaq listing and final OneQode documentation, expected within 60 to 90 days of the binding letter. If both confirm, the discount that small, formerly Canadian-listed names typically carry should narrow. The infrastructure itself, owned power in a tier-one EU jurisdiction, is the part competitors can't easily reproduce.
