HIVE borrows about $129 million to buy a $165 million Nvidia chip cluster for Canada

What was announced

HIVE Digital Technologies, a company that builds and runs data centres powered by renewable energy, said an indirect subsidiary called BUZZ Alpha Cloud has signed a loan agreement with an institutional lender. As Stock Titan reported, the credit facility is approximately $129 million. The money will buy a cluster of Nvidia GB200 chips, along with the networking and storage around them, for a total of $165 million.

The cluster consists of 2,303 NVIDIA GB200 GPUs. A GPU, or graphics processing unit, is the kind of chip that does the heavy math for training and running AI models. The release says the systems are NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 machines, and that they will be deployed in Canada.

Delivery is expected toward the end of the fourth quarter of 2026. The announcement is dated October 28, 2026, so the hardware is still to come. This is a purchase plan backed by financing, not a working cluster.

The customer behind the chips

The cluster is not being bought on spec. It is tied to a contract with Cohere, the AI company, which HIVE announced on June 18, 2026. That contract runs three years at a fixed value of $225 million and covers computing power, connectivity and storage.

HIVE also says it has signed $600 million of contracts this year across three agreements to provide GPU capacity. The Cohere deal is one slice of that figure. The release does not break out the other two here.

The loan is meant to be repaid from the Cohere revenue on a fixed schedule. That matches the debt to a specific stream of income instead of to the whole company.

How the financing works

The loan carries a fixed interest rate of 9.0% a year for three years. It is amortizing, which means each payment covers some interest and some principal, so the balance shrinks over time instead of coming due all at once. The lender is covering approximately 80% of the project's cost, a ratio known as loan-to-cost.

HIVE is paying the rest using money from earlier convertible bonds, a type of debt that can later turn into shares. Those bonds carry 0% interest and raised $245 million gross, about $200 million after subtracting the cost of protective trades called capped calls. No new HIVE common shares are issued for this loan, so existing shareholders are not diluted by it.

The lender's protection comes in layers:

• The GPUs and related assets secure the loan.
• BUZZ HPC, HIVE's computing subsidiary, gives a limited-recourse guarantee, meaning the lender's claim on it is capped and the subsidiary is not otherwise liable.
• BUZZ HPC's ownership stake in BUZZ Alpha Cloud is pledged.

The loan also has covenants, which are promises the borrower must keep. These include required debt-service coverage ratios, a test of whether income is large enough to cover loan payments. When the term ends, HIVE will own the GPUs outright with no final payment owed.

The Canada angle

HIVE frames the project around data sovereignty, the idea that sensitive data and the computers that process it should stay under a country's control. The release says Canada's federal AI strategy points toward investing in homegrown technology and keeping Canadian data under Canadian control. It adds that the new infrastructure will keep compute within Canadian borders.

The company argues that as AI spreads into government, healthcare, finance and industry, organizations increasingly want to know where their data is stored, where models run and where the computing comes from. HIVE says it has operated since 2017 with data centres in Canada, Sweden and Paraguay. The release does not name a site for this cluster.

These are the company's own arguments and hopes. The release gives no detail on who besides Cohere might use the capacity, or on pricing.

What could go wrong

The release's risk list is long, and several items matter here. Delivery of Nvidia systems could be delayed by supply constraints, and costs could run over. Cohere could fail to meet its obligations, or the contract could be changed or ended. If revenue falls short, HIVE might miss its coverage tests, and in a default the lender could take the GPUs and the pledged equity.

Another risk is technological. The company itself flags that GPU hardware can lose its useful life or resale value faster than expected as newer chips arrive. That matters because the loan is secured by those same chips, and the financing assumes they stay valuable for the contract's full three years.

Also note that HIVE's loan costs 9.0%, while the convertible bonds funding the rest cost nothing in interest. The mix of the two is a financial choice, not a guarantee of profit, and the release does not report what margin HIVE expects.