HIVE stock surges 25% as Ivy League researchers train neural networks on Paraguay GPUs

Shares of the bitcoin miner-turned-AI infrastructure provider Hive Digital Technologies (HIVE) surged by nearly 25% on Monday to around the $5.20 level, their highest level in more than seven months, after the company showcased research conducted by a Columbia University team using its GPU cluster in Paraguay.

According to a company release, researchers based in New York trained neural networks remotely on HIVE's infrastructure in Asunción, Paraguay, studying ways to make large language models more efficient. The research has been submitted to the NeurIPS conference, one of the biggest gatherings for AI research, which will be held in December.

HIVE said the study found its Nvidia A40 GPUs delivered performance that was comparable to newer systems for certain workloads, which Executive Chairman Frank Holmes described as "proof of concept" for intercontinental AI training.

This builds on a project first unveiled in March, when HIVE launched its Paraguay cluster as an early testing ground for running AI training jobs over long distances. At the time, the company said Columbia researchers were using the facility to benchmark latency, throughput, and distributed training performance while it evaluated high-performance computing in the country.

HIVE currently operates roughly 300 megawatts of hydro-powered infrastructure in Paraguay and has another 100 megawatts under development. Earlier this year, the company also unveiled plans for a 320 megawatt "AI gigafactory" in the Toronto area that it says could eventually support more than 100,000 GPUs.

This also comes just days after HIVE announced a three-year, $220 million AI cloud contract with Bell Canada and Cohere. The company expects the deal, involving over 2,300 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs, to add roughly $70 milion in annual recurring revenue beginning later this year.