Hut 8 Wins Poolin's Two Texas Sites With a $140M Auction Bid

Hut 8 won the bankruptcy auction for two West Texas data centers on Wednesday with a bid of $140 million. The sites are Pyote and Tarbush, and they belonged to Poolin, the mining pool that froze wallet withdrawals in 2022 and filed for Chapter 11 in July. Bidding opened at $52 million. A judge in New Jersey has to approve the sale on 29 September before anything changes hands.

What the bidding did to the price

Thor CALAP set the floor as stalking-horse bidder, at $15 million for Pyote and $37 million for Tarbush. A stalking horse is the opening offer a bankrupt estate lines up before an auction, so that nothing sells for less than that. Two other bidders came in above it. DigiPower X put $36.5 million on Pyote, which is where The Block and a KuCoin flash both place the bid; Crypto Briefing calls the same $36.5 million a backup offer and does not say for which site, and the two accounts do not reconcile on that point. Fluidstack, bidding through Pecos Industrial Development, offered $100.5 million for Tarbush alone. That figure appears in The Block's report and the KuCoin flash and nowhere else we checked. bloomingbit, which published within minutes of The Block, gives the result as about 2.7 times the reserve and names no rival bidders at all.

Where the money is owed

Poolin listed about $173.1 million in obligations, and roughly $163.7 million of that is unsecured IOUs issued to Poolin Wallet users after the 2022 freeze. Those are ordinary creditors, last in line. The case covers Poolin and two US affiliates. Crypto Briefing dates the filing to 22 July and gives the company's base as Singapore; no other report we read carries either detail, and bloomingbit says only that it came late in the month. Crypto Briefing also has mining and hosting at the two sites stopping in July, and it is again the only account that puts a month on it.

A miner buying power, not machines

What Hut 8 is buying is grid access. Its second-quarter results, out on 4 August, put contracted IT capacity at 949 megawatts, with about $26.6 billion of expected value across the base terms of those contracts and average annual net operating income projected above $1.75 billion. The Block adds a development pipeline of 8.7 gigawatts, up roughly 300 megawatts on the quarter, a figure we could not find in the results release itself. Cryptopolitan reckons the Poolin sites take the company's Texas footprint to about 1.5 gigawatts across operating and development assets, and it is alone in saying so. Only Crypto Briefing gives the two sites a capacity at all, at roughly 100 megawatts between them. bloomingbit states outright that it does not have the figure. The same trade has been running all year, behind a hashrate that is down more than 20%.

Cryptopolitan also puts numbers on why land with a grid connection is worth more than the machinery standing on it, citing CoinShares: leased AI capacity changes hands near $27 million a megawatt, unleased mining capacity below $3 million. It gives no date for either figure, and no other outlet carries them. It adds that data centers now account for 87% of the 410 gigawatts queued for large loads with the Texas grid operator. Public miners have been reporting the same shift in their own accounts for two quarters, most plainly when IREN's AI cloud revenue overtook its mining revenue.

Four questions the reports leave open

Hut 8 has not said what the two buildings are for. Nothing published on Wednesday establishes whether they take AI tenants, go back to mining, or are held for the interconnection and sold on. How much of the $140 million reaches the wallet creditors, and in what order, is not stated anywhere either. Nor is there any indication of whether the 29 September hearing is contested. Until the court signs, the only settled facts are four bids and a date.