Bitcoin Data Center Firm Backed By Trump's Sons May Go Public Following Acquisition

A 6-week-old data center firm launched by two of President Donald Trump’s sons has public market ambitions following its bitcoin rebrand and acquisition by Hut 8 this week.

Crypto mining and artificial intelligence giant Hut 8 announced Monday it had taken an 80% stake in American Data Centers, a company launched in February by an investor group led by Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. The firm is being rebranded as American Bitcoin and said in a statement that it will now focus exclusively on bitcoin mining and strategic bitcoin reserve development.

Under the terms of the deal, Miami-based Hut 8 is transferring all of its bitcoin mining equipment to American Bitcoin, accelerating the larger firm’s ongoing shift away from mining cryptocurrencies and toward providing high-performance computing for artificial intelligence. Rather than being structured as a subsidiary of Hut 8, American Bitcoin will effectively operate as a standalone company.

Hut 8 CEO Asher Genoot told Bloomberg TV Tuesday that the new entity will raise its own private capital, with the goal of ultimately joining Nasdaq-listed Hut 8 on public markets. 

“So, you can see this in the long term as two sister publicly traded companies,” Genoot said. “One that is energy, infrastructure data centers and the other one that’s bitcoin, AISCs and reserves, and together they form a vertically integrated company that has some of the best economics out there.” 

American Bitcoin will be led by former Hut 8 Chief Commercial Officer Matt Prusak, with Eric Trump listed as the company’s chief strategy officer. For a company that has existed for less than two months, the shift to bitcoin represents a significant pivot from American Data Centers’ stated goal of building a “robust portfolio of cutting-edge, energy-efficient data centers strategically located in key markets across the US.”

According to an investor presentation outlining the deal, American Bitcoin will begin operations from Hut 8’s data centers in Medicine Hat, Alberta; Orla, Texas; and Niagara Falls, New York, and will later deploy miners at a new Hut 8 campus in development in Texas. 

Hut 8 has 19 data center sites in operation or development. Last month, the company secured 592 acres for a new data center campus in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. The River Bend Campus is expected to have 300 megawatts of capacity and cost around $2.5B, according to the firm. 

Hut 8 is also in the process of building a 205 MW data center in the Texas panhandle that the company calls Vega. The campus, which is slated to host American Bitcoin hardware, is expected to come online in the second quarter. 

Once one of the most firmly established players in the bitcoin mining space, Hut 8’s decision to move away from crypto in favor of AI mirrors an industrywide trend. Volatile bitcoin prices and increasingly thin margins for miners in the wake of last year's bitcoin halving have coincided with the unprecedented explosion of demand for AI computing, driving many of the most prominent crypto miners to shift their focus toward hosting training workloads for Big Tech customers. 

One such company was CoreWeave, now an AI cloud provider that debuted on the Nasdaq Stock Market last week. Firms like Crusoe, Applied Digital and Core Scientific were among the many firms to pursue similar strategies.  

Recent bullishness around bitcoin, sparked in part by the Trump administration’s enthusiasm for cryptocurrency, has helped some of the largest former miners find buyers or investors to help them spin off their remaining crypto operations or divest from the mining sector entirely. In addition to Hut 8’s deal with American Bitcoin, Crusoe sold its crypto operation to NYDIG in March, exiting crypto entirely to focus on AI computing. 

American Bitcoin isn't the Trump family’s first foray into crypto. Last week, World Liberty Financial, a crypto business backed by the president and his two oldest sons, announced it would offer a so-called stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar. According to Reuters, the Trump family will claim 75% of net revenues from World Liberty’s token sales and 60% of revenue from operations. 

On Wednesday, Democratic lawmakers Elizabeth Warren and Maxine Waters sent a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission asking it to preserve records pertaining to the Trump family’s crypto ventures and raising questions about potential conflicts of interest between Trump’s stake in World Liberty and the administration’s support for crypto-friendly policies. These conflicts of interest were also the focus of a House Financial Services Committee hearing Wednesday on a bill that would help legitimize such stablecoins. 

Trump leaned into support for cryptocurrencies during his campaign and has pursued pro-crypto policies since taking office. Last month, the president issued an executive order creating a strategic reserve of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Under his administration, the SEC has also dropped investigations into a number of crypto firms, and it withdrew a lawsuit against crypto exchange Coinbase. 

The Trump administration’s penchant for digital currencies has been a boon for miners and the crypto industry as a whole. Bitcoin values are up more than 30% since Election Day, while the past two months have seen an uptick in expansion plans across the previously stagnant mining space. 

In March, Bitfarms acquired fellow miner Stronghold Digital Mining, with plans to expand its U.S. mining operations, while Galaxy Digital financed the expansion of Soluna’s 187 MW mining site in Texas. In February, mining firm BitFuFu acquired a 51 MW Oklahoma data center.

Speaking with Bisnow in December, Hut 8’s Genoot suggested that crypto miners’ Trump tailwind is less about specific policies and more a matter of the administration giving legitimacy to a sector that has largely been viewed with skepticism by government and financial institutions. 

“The incoming administration has been very vocal around their support of the industry as a whole. There's been messaging as well regarding wanting to mine bitcoin in the USA,” Genoot said in December. “We've seen a lot of positive momentum and sentiment. … There's a lot more of a tailwind for the industry.”