WSS: Earnings season sees more growth acceleration as crypto to colo segment pushes leasing momentum
Earnings season continued as the sector continues to push forward at an aggressive clip. Data centre operators continue to see healthy growth as hyperscale, neocloud and AI growth is driving demand for data centre infrastructure. Equinix and Digital Realty have traditionally been the two bellwethers, and we looked more closely at Digital Realty’s results this past week, which showed revenue growth acceleration amid strong leasing momentum. Iron Mountain also saw its results propelled by good leasing performance. As we noted last week, earnings season is now populated by a number of listed companies that were not part of the sector that long ago. But expertise around land, energy, infrastructure, construction, permitting and supply chains has made cryptocurrency firms a natural fit for the data centre business and they are moving into the market quickly. The land and energy holdings are the main assets these companies have and they are taking full advantage, providing hyperscale tenants with capacity, expansion runway and aggressive time-to-market timelines. The value proposition is real and leasing is happening, and we get a window into the activity through the earnings reports. Last week, we looked at the results from TeraWulf and Galaxy Digital, and this week we look more closely at the earnings reports coming from Hut 8, Core Scientific and Riot Platforms. The crypto to colo crowd is moving into the sector quickly, and is set to be a mainstay within the competitive landscape. There are growing pains to be sure, and bumps in the road, but leasing activity and the execution in delivery has been encouraging.
Leasing at hyperscale levels from the crypto to colo demographic has been moving at a frenetic pace, further validating the model. Hut 8 confirmed leasing another 352MW of IT load at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces, Texas, while Core Scientific got a commitment from AMD for gigawatt-level capacity and 530MW of capacity has already been built out across multiple US-based locations. Riot Platforms is another listed crypo turned colo provider and also closed a lease with AMD for a smaller 50MW increment, while securing 191MW deal with an undisclosed AI frontier lab reported in media outlets to be Anthropic. And Bitdeer, also publicly listed, signed a 121MW lease in Norway for neocloud Volta. Not from the cryptocurrency space is another new entrant called Fermi, which signed neocloud TensorWave to a data centre lease in Carson County, Texas. Volta recently raised funding and we tracked a number of other neoclouds that have raised both debt and equity recently. We recently spoke with Deep Infra and they raised $107m in a Series A, while Sharon AI has raised money to support a number of cloud infrastructure contracts it has closed, with NVIDIA and other AI-native companies. Meanwhile, Sharon AI also reported its 2Q26 results recently and we take a closer look. Elsewhere, General Compute recently raised $400m in debt to build its young neocloud business and Lambda got itself an asset-backed loan of nearly $1b.
Earnings season is set to expand further as the ecosystem widens and investor interest in all things hyperscale and AI remain high. Csquare recently went public and there are media reports pointing to the possibility of the likes of CyrusOne, Switch, DayOne and Vantage Data Centers listing on the public markets.
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