Hive's AI Revenue Jumped 70 Percent. Frank Holmes Says the Mining Side Still Carries It

Hive Digital Technologies executive chairman Frank Holmes sat down on Simply Bitcoin the same morning his company reported quarterly earnings, and the conversation ranged from Bitcoin mining economics to a Paraguayan president's resignation to a spy scandal engulfing Nvidia's chief executive.

AN EARNINGS BEAT WITH AN ASTERISK

Hive generated revenue of $84.9 million for the quarter ended September 30, up 7.3% sequentially but down 2.7% year over year. BUZZ, the company's HPC and AI cloud business, increased 70.7% year over year to $8.8 million, while gross operating margin rose to $30.2 million, or 35.6% of revenue. The quarter produced a net loss of $78.7 million, which included $54.9 million of depreciation and a $31.2 million mining-equipment impairment, while adjusted EBITDA came in positive at $24.8 million. The company ended the period with $139 million in cash and $22.6 million in digital currencies.

On the show, Holmes framed the quarter as resilience rather than stagnation, noting that revenue held roughly flat even as Bitcoin's price fell sharply over the same stretch, a sign he attributed to the scale Hive has built as it mines close to 2% of the Bitcoin network. The company reported a GPU Cloud annualized run rate of roughly $40 million already live and about $185 million contracted, including a three-year sovereign AI agreement worth approximately $225 million with Bell's AI fabric supporting Cohere, and a five-year, roughly $350 million deal with an unnamed investment-grade enterprise customer.

TEXAS TURNS BLUE OVER DATA CENTERS

The conversation turned to the midterms, where Holmes pointed to gender and age splits in the exit polls and argued that rising energy, food and housing costs, not ideology, drove the swing. Democrat Gina Hinojosa unseated Republican Governor Greg Abbott in Texas after blaming him for the rapid buildout of data centers across the state, while Democrat James Talarico defeated Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton for the state's open Senate seat.

Forty-one data center-related ballot measures were up for a vote across 10 states in the midterms, and voters backed restrictions or rejected pro-development measures in every contest except one, in Harwood, North Dakota. Holmes argued the backlash is really an energy-inflation story wearing a data center costume, pointing to electricity and gas prices that have climbed for his own Texas employees.

A BANK COLLAPSE TOPPLES A PRESIDENT

Holmes also discussed Paraguay, where Hive operates part of its Bitcoin mining fleet, after a banking crisis cost the country its president days before the interview. Paraguay's central bank seized Ueno Bank, a digital lender that had grown to claim more than 60% of the country's adults as customers, triggering protests that cost President Santiago Peña the support of his own party. Peña submitted his resignation on November 5, but lawmakers rejected it. The Senate removed him from office the following day following impeachment proceedings tied to the banking crisis.

Holmes credited Paraguay's institutions, specifically the Senate's willingness to remove its own president, with containing a crisis that might have spiraled further in a country with weaker checks and balances, and said it was a reason Hive continues to view Paraguay as a stable base for its mining and AI infrastructure build-out there.

NVIDIA'S CEO AND THE ALLEGED SPY

The segment closed on a story that broke the same week: the scandal around Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang. Huang was involved in an extramarital affair with Alice Huang, a Chinese executive at a Singaporean company who had allegedly been recruited by China's Ministry of State Security to serve as a spy. Huang sent an apology to Nvidia employees admitting to marital infidelity on November 8, and Nvidia's stock fell as much as 8% in early trading the following day before paring losses.

Holmes framed the episode as a geopolitical rather than personal story, arguing that any disruption to Nvidia's leadership benefits Beijing more than Washington given the company's central role in the global AI buildout that Hive itself is trying to plug into.

HOLMES STAYS BULLISH ON BITCOIN

Asked to look past the current slide, Holmes said he remains bullish on Bitcoin into 2027 and beyond, arguing that continued government deficit spending leaves hard assets, Bitcoin included, as one of the few places capital can preserve its value across a crisis. He pointed to Hive's own balance sheet discipline, its $139 million in cash, as the reason the company can keep expanding its AI infrastructure in Canada, Sweden and Paraguay even while the broader AI financing market tightens around it.

This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.