Cipher Mining at Barclays Forum: Strategic Moves Amid Volatility

On Monday, 19 May 2025, Cipher Mining (NASDAQ:CIFR) participated in the Barclays 15th Annual Emerging Payments and FinTech Forum. The company discussed its strategic initiatives amid a volatile market. With a focus on low-cost power and strategic partnerships, Cipher Mining highlighted both opportunities and challenges in the rapidly evolving crypto mining landscape.

Key Takeaways

• Cipher Mining boasts the lowest power cost in the industry at 2.7¢ per kilowatt hour.
• The company secured a $50 million investment from SoftBank.
• Strategic partnerships are in place for the Barber Lake site development.
• A positive outlook on Bitcoin adoption and network growth was shared.
• Tariff risks are managed through capital access and international manufacturing.

Financial Results

• Cipher Mining operates with a pipeline of 2.8 gigawatts of power.
• The company has received significant investment, including $50 million from SoftBank.
• A partnership with an investment group will finance the Barber Lake data center.

Operational Updates

• Cipher Mining is expanding into high-performance computing (HPC) data centers.
• The company is leveraging its expertise in developing greenfield sites, particularly in West Texas.

Future Outlook

• Cipher Mining anticipates a transitional period for Bitcoin, with potential for significant network adoption.
• The company believes Bitcoin will evolve from tech stock-like growth to a store-of-value asset akin to gold.

ASIC Hardware and Tariffs

• The panel acknowledged Bitmain’s dominance in the ASIC market but welcomed competition.
• Tariff uncertainties are more challenging than the costs, and some manufacturing is conducted outside China to mitigate risks.

Q&A Highlights

• Tyler Page, CEO and founder, emphasized Cipher Mining’s low power cost as a competitive advantage.
• Discussions included Bitcoin’s potential as a capital asset on balance sheets and power as a bottleneck in the industry.

For a detailed understanding of Cipher Mining’s strategies and insights shared during the forum, refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Barclays 15th Annual Emerging Payments and FinTech Forum:

Operator: Yeah. Well, good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us here today for a discussion on crypto mining. We have three of the top crypto mining companies in the world here with us today, Fifth Year, Cypher, and Greenspark. Thank you all for joining us. Let’s start, and why don’t we take a moment for you to just introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your respective companies.

Alright, sir. Carrie Vicarelli, chief branch officer for Kingsport. We currently have over 42 extra hash of processing power, producing about 22 and a half Bitcoin a day. We’re solely focused on Bitcoin mining, primarily in The US, and we have over 12,000 Bitcoin on our balance sheet currently. Hi.

I’m Tyler Page. I’m the CEO and founder of Cypher Mining. We too are a Bitcoin miner. We also are in the burgeoning HPC space for data centers. And seeing across both of those businesses, we’re probably best known in the industry for our expertise at originating greenfield sites and favorable power contracts.

We’re known as having the lowest cost of power in the mining industry at 2.7¢ per kilowatt hour. We do that basically through active management of curtailment and then trading and hedging in the Texas market. It’s, Jeff Hirsch, head of Capital Markets and Strategy here. This year is a capital miner, but we are also a technology company. So, we have a seven gigawatts of power portfolio.

That’s just over a gigawatt of that. It’s currently used for mining Bitcoin, but we are also entering into the Bitcoin mining manufacturing space. So we can check your ASICs, and this is for for supplying use as well as scale to third parties. We are also exploring the the HPC and AI opportunity and within our of our power portfolio, we believe we’ve got a number of sites that that are suitable for that. So we are very interested.

Awesome. Thank you. Let’s start off with kind of your bigger thoughts on Bitcoin and and what you’re seeing in the market. What’s the the consumer market backdrop, what headwinds or tailwinds should we be watching for? Terry, let’s start with you.

Well, we’re very focused on Bitcoin, obviously. And I think that what’s really the biggest tailwind is the change in administration. Mhmm. We’re still having the Trump administration that’s obviously very crypto Bitcoin friendly. It’s been very helpful.

SEC is also a lot more friendly these days. So I think that on a regulatory front, that’s gonna be helpful. But what we’re really seeing is some real tailwinds with demand that’s starting to come in the marketplace. There’s a lot of talk about, you know, the strategic reserves. There’s nation states that are giving in gains by Bitcoin.

And now Bitcoin treasury companies are becoming the new fab. So really what we’re seeing is this buildup of demand with Bitcoin. We saw a little bit of spike in Bitcoin prices. We can almost get into a all time high. So, ultimately, a combination of, you know, regulatory, political tailwinds and and some demand challenge again for Bitcoin.

I think it’s it’s something that we’re looking forward to get some appreciation in Bitcoin at least over the next twelve to twenty four months. Tyler, do have anything you done? Yeah. I would just add that I I think we are in the transitional period probably now for Bitcoin. I’ve now been working in this space for eight eight years.

And when I see this, the question around Bitcoin valuation has always been one to me that is about network adoption of of a new kind of network. And so the the fundamental question investors need to ask themselves, and and the reason I moved my career into space because I I thought it was obvious was because this network with now, you know, maybe 200,000,000 users grow like, like, the Internet or, like, cellular networks and and have billions of users. And I think it’s very logical that that will happen. Because folks, you know, this market it’s a very volatile market. It trades twenty four seven, three sixty five.

It gets a lot of eyeballs day to day. Exciting. I’m sure my panelists were like me up to three in the morning seeing what was coming on in Asia. After I went to bed and it was a 7,000 last night, I’m a bit disappointed. It’s open to the other direction.

But on a longer time frame, you know, all these things Gary mentioned here are just signposts on the way to broader adoption of the network. And so over a longer term time frame, you know, we’re extraordinarily bullish. I think it’s inevitable. Day to day, these things sort of swing up and down. Long term, it’s really only moved in one direction with some brief setbacks here and there over the last eight years.

So it’s good to continue. Great. Well, I have to ask the question. What are your pricing price expectations? I was with Michael Taylor a couple of weeks ago, and and he said with the banking adoption in the sector, he’s quoted $25,000,000.

So I’m curious what you guys think over the next year, three years, five years. Jeff, let’s let’s start with you. Yeah. I mean, look, I I I think that kind of said that the the direction has been, you know, kind of in the right, you know, long term. It’s been obviously very, very volatile in in this time.

But, you know, I think what you just say about this option, I think that is really the what is gonna change you to the next level. I mean, people talk about this thing as digital gold, but, you know, digital gold has been acted more like, you know, a a piece of an asset and, you know, where a tech point is really much more highly correlated with tech stocks and and other risk on assets. So historically, we’ve seen, you know, when you have broad market or global uncertainty sell up in the market in the broader market, Bitcoin sold off alongside of that. Now Central was, you know, I I think the first kind of divergence from that where, you know, we actually saw a lot of global uncertainty, a lot of macro, you know, sectors coming in, you know, markets were down. I mean, gold was up, what, 5%.

At this point, was up to eight to 14%. So small sample size, and I think that is what you needed to sort of take it to those hundred 50, 2 hundred thousand dollar level. It’s gonna have that that broader usage, broader adoption, and, you know, kind of a change of view on the asset as a whole. Tyler, Gary. Great adventure with you.

Come on. I love my. And I don’t know if I’d be sitting here, but I went to my board of directors and said, hey. Sequence will be at $5,000,000. So let’s plan the business on that.

Mhmm. It it’s it’s really hard to plan a business around that type of optimism. Personally, I believe that pretty well might see that in our lifetime. Mhmm. But, you know, look, this is a hard business to forecast over the next twelve months, but let alone the next thirty six or sixty months.

We operate our business from a very conservative view. So our internal models have it slightly going slightly higher where where it’s at now. And everything from there is just upside. And I think that’s the the proper way to run a business is, you know, just some cautious optimism. Mhmm.

And if you get to 200, 2 hundred 50 thousand in a short time frame, that’s great. We’re well positioned to manage that. Great. It’s the only thing I’d add is sort of pulling on that same thread I had before. To me, trying to figure out the place is always this question of when do we flip from this network adoption story so it looks more like a tech stock because it is, like, you know, in an early stage.

I would still call it early stage given the magnitude of total addressable market of every human company and government on earth, theoretically. You know, still kinda early, but at some point, that network adoption story will flip, and it will be more like digital gold and be more of sort of an inflationary story. And I think that’s what’s so hard that you put any number out there, know, I think, Taylor is a little too ambitious for my credit card. But but I think if you put a long enough time frame on it, you could have any number. It’s just that we will probably grow very fast in spurts at times as long as the network adoption story overwhelms kind of store of value inflation story.

But probably, you know, when I’m on my head, it will be true, hopefully, which is a long, long term in the future, assuming it is. It’ll be trading more like a hidden asset, gold yen, Swiss bank, something like that. Mhmm. When that happens, it’s hard to say. So it probably raises.

I think it’s be at all time highs really soon. And then it might tap up to, like, a $200,000 number, does it sort of flatten out and trade more like a gold bear or does it go to a million before it’s a that’s really, really hard to see. Yep. Makes sense. Well, I wanted to ask about the strategy of hodling versus selling mines just wanted to fund operations.

Terry, on your side, I know you’ve had different policies over the course of the company and recently kind of shifted to selling a portion of of mine. Can you talk about the drivers of that decision and how you think about that? So at the end of the day, are not ideological about Bitcoin as that. Produces capital asset on the balance sheet. And just a little context, you know, we were really holding a % of our monthly production starting in November 23.

And here in April, we started really selling percentage of our production to cover OpEx. So we went on the record a couple of years ago saying that the 100% hovel strategy is not stable. We still believe that. But we really hoveled during a point in time when we felt that there was gonna be major appreciation of Bitcoin itself. We just see this as prudent capital management.

Right? Bitcoin is our constant currency. We manage to profitability. And so so to us, if we could, you know, see the power of bills and operating expenses with Bitcoin, service fee debt that we might have and increase our huddle balance, we just see that really as a as the right combination for our business. Great.

Separately, on the the I know you talked about it a little bit, Tyler and and and Jeff, the beginning, just kind of your AI data center component. How do you view this market opportunity in relation to Bitcoin mining? And and, you know, what is your strategy around it? Tyler, let’s let’s start with you. Sure.

So I would say the the the space has evolved over time. I think starting really with the ascendancy of the large language models, you know, roughly two years ago, there has just been an explosion in the desire for these large interconnects available sooner. Historically, on the HPC side, a really big data center was 30 megawatts in the Dulles Corridor, something like that. Suddenly, you know, the the the need for training to have hundreds of megawatts has forced that industry to look to nontraditional places, like West Texas where we happen to have a lot of large interconnects. Our company has a total operating and pipeline of 2.8 gigawatts of power.

So what has happened is there’s been a huge push and interest in these large interconnects available sooner because everyone is racing to have the winning model. And so we happen to have angled the company really starting a year ago, leveraging our expertise at developing greenfield sites to aggressively position ourselves for these large interconnects available in the next three years. As a result, a lot of that interest in that market has come to us. We have been very busy speaking to hypersteal or the type of tenants that can take down 300 megawatts at a single site. You know, on the back of this, we’ve had some announcements.

We we took a $50,000,000 investment from SoftBank right around the time of Stronghold. They had an exclusivity on one of our sites for a scratch. We recently announced a financial partnership, framework with the investment group where they are our financial partner at our Barber Lake site and are backstopping the entire cost of the build of the data center so that when we are speaking to hyperstore tenants, they can feel comfortable that deep pockets are are can stand that up. Because I think a lot one of the things that’s difficult for a company that has been traditionally Bitcoin mining is, you know, that’s a little bit exotic if you’re gonna be the partner of a trillion dollar market cap company that is building 3 and a half trillion dollar data center. So I think we’re we’re working through the necessary sort of partnerships that we’re sitting on what we think are the really rare valuable pieces there.

Everyone in that space says it’s a bottleneck is power. So that’s how we’re thinking about it. And it looks like my mind is a great business as well. They have different characteristics. And so over time, I see us having a balance of two businesses.

So if you have any different yeah. I mean, look, I I agree with everything Tyler just said. I mean, we’re all kinda looking at this opportunity differently. You know, some not at all. You know, some are looking to make a full transition to it, and, you know, some are kinda right in the middle.

So the way we are looking at it as is is that, look, we have a significant power portfolio right now. You know, sometimes people want to monetize at all for mining. It doesn’t necessarily sound like the the most prudent thing to do. So looking to diversify some of that revenue into other areas, which will ultimately attract local, you know, getting the stability of of the revenue to diversify the base. But see what we’re really looking at is to look at the way to, you know, ultimately reduce the cost of capital for what we consider our core business, which is gonna be the the ASIC manufacturing.

So we are, you know, like I said, having the right expertise from your team to to be able to execute on a on a data center like this much quicker to get from mining. I just love to hear our our finding that out now. So, you know, we made the decision to work with with the strategic partner, both the development and a financial partner because you know, I have to say they’re looking for a few people that they’ve worked with before, people that know that can execute on on a project of this scale. And, you know, it’s not just about having the megawatt. It’s about surrounding that with the right team and the right capital providers.

Interesting. And you mentioned your your own Bitcoin mining machine. Can you talk to us about the the SteelMiner and and your rationale for the project and, you know, what advantages you think it brings? Yeah. So, I mean, the the rationale is is, you know, this is development really in our in our DNA.

And if you look, our most people know our our founders, Jihun Wu, who is also the founder of of. Our chief strategy officer is a guy by the name of Harris Acid. He also has a deep semiconductor and background. He actually developed the the current site design that’s basically used in every point mining rig since 02/2014. It’s just some kind of derivative of that that his team put together.

So it’s it’s really part of our working background and, like, can’t just give us a a a different moat around our business than just a pure play, you know, get on mining. It’s also gives us lot of strategic advantages. So on, you know, just on the self mining side, we can produce ASIC for for our own self money fleet, you know, at a meaningful discount to to the rest of the market. We can also sell them to third parties as well. So, you know, it gives a lot of flexibility, a lot of optionality for us.

And as far as looking differently than, you know, others, you know, right now, you can argue, it’s be not that much because everything we’re that we’ve done over the last few years, it’s really been built on that 2,014 architecture, you know, constantly offering that. But most of those advances become really a a foundry or the the fab level. You know, TSMC and others have gotten better at their processes. So every time you come out with a new wafer or inner wafer, you know, you can jump in efficiency, pretty juicy little incremental jumps from there. But we are working on on a new IP design that, you know, we think we’ll we’ll still revolutionize that, and we’re gonna take that out later this year.

Great. For for Gary and and Tyler, how do you see the market for ASIC client hardware evolving? It seems you have a a pretty dominant market share that’s that’s sustained itself over time. Does this bring concentration risk in terms of suppliers? How do you think about tariff risk?

What what does this market look like going forward to you, Eric? Yeah. So so there’s a a number of players now that are coming to market. I’m looking forward to seeing, you know, the Bidder machine come out here, shortly. But, we’re primarily Bidding right now.

Bidding, you know, it’s kinda like the old guys. Right? Like, you know, when I got hired for buying IBM, that means it’s been very solid machines, and they’ve, you know, been very successful and have a majority of market share. But we obviously welcome competition in in the marketplace. You know, there’s one miner that’s currently gonna be manufactured onshore.

We’ll evaluate all the miners. We think that it’s, you know, the days of $90 a terahash aren’t you know, we still don’t foresee that happening. Sorry, Jeff. You don’t want to catch it anytime soon. But, you know, that’s just about competition.

Right? We think that it’s gonna keep the the cost of CapEx a little a little lower. In terms of tariff risk, I mean, you know, it’s a whipsaw. Right? You gotta be able to to plan for it.

We don’t buy any of our miners from China, you know, contractually need to make sure that they are, you know, manufactured in Malaysia. So, you know, it is appealing to have miners manufactured in other areas, but you never know what’s gonna go on with this administration where they’re going where the tariffs are gonna land. And, ultimately, you gotta have access to capital and a 10% tariff. You know, if if you’re really worried about that, you got a problem with the business model and capitalization of the company. So I think that that’s one of the things that I feel really comfortable, and I have a tendency for it.

Right? It’s like we’re well capitalized. We have access to a decent cost of capital. So if there is that, tariff risk, you can address the head on or we can delay purchases, which ultimately is a level thing for us because it’s gonna apply to everyone. And if the tariffs are so significant, that it reduces the purchases.

That just is gonna keep a lid on on cold cash rates. So that’s what I think we’ve always taken the approach that, you know, certainly, Kidney has the most market share, and you have to have a relationship with them. They make good machines. There’s a reason why they have that market share, and we’re a of theirs. We have always tried to diversify and look forward to also sustain and perhaps find some steel miners in the future.

Partly, traditionally, we worked with Michael and T and Cannon as well. I think we’ve always viewed there being a lot of risk to those companies. They’re privately held. They they were Chinese or are Chinese in origin, so you couldn’t always get the best picture of their financials. And so, you know, earlier in the business several years ago, one of the risks was sort of like, you know, you spend this giant bag of money across the world and and hopefully, machines show up in six months, and it definitely caused me and our CFO quite a few sleepless nights early in those expensive dollar fair hash days.

So I think we we’ve always tried to stay sort of diversified among the manufacturers just as to sort of protect against any particular company risk. So we’ve all done pretty well. We we we always wanna find other manufacturers. I think what what’s also unique for for us, we are in Texas, hot place, harsh environment sometimes. Some machines that often have, like, the best specs for perfect environments are also the most finicky and harder environment.

So it’s not as easy as just kinda like, give me the one with the best horsepower because maybe it’s only the best horsepower in perfect conditions. And you can tweak the conditions, but that also costs more CapEx. It’s sort of a constant ROI evaluation battle to figure out where you want to strike the balance on those factors, and so that will always be going into our analysis. And then to that end, tariffs are challenging in the sense that, and it’s not unique to our industry, but the uncertainty is the cause. It’s not so much the numbers or the fact that you can’t plan for a 10% tariff.

It’s there is a tweak, and you have a 34% tariff. You know, I think that’s the challenge because we have always been really focused on being pretty strict in in planning on, like, what’s the payback look like, what’s our ROI on this investment when we make choices of machine and and timing and so forth. And, you know, certainly, when it’s sort of you wake up the next day and, again, the cost spike from your largest cost estimate of 34%, it’s it’s not gonna cause, like, financial distress so much as, wow, that really changes how I feel about the ROI, and maybe we would have thought timing to come here or whatever. So I’d say right now, the landscape was, like, 10% across the board in tariffs outside of China. Fine, very easy to plan around.

I would say, and it seems like the administration is on this path, it seems like they have gotten kind of broader messages from the industry that clearer projections about where things are gonna go and maybe more measured steps. It can be easier when you when you plan projects, we’re in the crucible for for industry in general. We make these decisions and, like, we have a data center coming online in a month, like, Pearl, this month. And, you know, that’s ten and eighteen months, sixteen months using project. And part of that is depending on when you make these big payments across the world to Asia.

You know, in the interim, when you get uncertainty on what the input costs are, that’s a challenging environment to operate. So, hopefully, we continue towards that kind of, like, here’s the level, here’s where it’s gonna operate. It seems like it’s gonna be set up. And and from a technology perspective, you mentioned the conditions. How important are some of the technologies we talked about in this industry like liquid cooling versus air cooling?

So from our perspective, again, we tend to go back to the numbers and think of it as like a series of levers. And if you pull this one down, the other three move in in different levels. So there’s not kinda one correct answer across the board, which is why I think every company has a bit of a different approach. We have tended to focus on air cooling historically, and what that has meant is that we, in general, are trying to plan for a lower CapEx there. There may be implications on what we pay for OpEx because it’s a harder operating environment for the machine, and maybe the specs on the performance of the machine are a little bit worse.

So when you think about Cypress positioning, again, we have the lowest cost of power, which drives, like, 90% of our OpEx. So the way we thought about moving the levers is we can deal with a little bit higher cost of ongoing OpEx in terms of how the machine performs or repairs that need to be done because it matches up with our low power cost. So let’s save the money on CapEx on the front end and think about ROI in the total project. When we think about it and we’ve looked at it and we think we will be doing projects in liquid cooling, again, it’s a broad generalization. The way you think about this sort of return on investment is if I move more of this to the CapEx front to fund it, do I turn it back in the performance over time with a with better performance and and profit.

So I don’t know that there’s one right answer. For us, it’s it’s really about sort of maximizing that ROI. Jeff and Jerry, do you have a similar difference here? Hey. I mean, obviously, we have a view from both both angles, obviously, as a seller and and the user.

But, I mean, look, the the new cooling solutions are definitely gonna play play a big role, you know, hydrocooling, immersion cooling. But like I was said, I mean, it’s it’s this is a quick turnaround conversion cycle as well too because you’re refreshing your sleep. You don’t know where technology is going, you know, a few years from now. It could be another jump from there. So you’re making a big CapEx investment on on the front end for, you know, immersion or or hydrocooling and knowing that you’re have to refresh that fleet maybe in two years, maybe three years, maybe you can get four years out of it.

But, you know, we’re the efficiency, you know, kind of curve plan during that time. So you need to be competitive, and I think we are kind of entering a a much more power constrained market than we had in previous years. And if you wanna grow, you know, sites were were available. You know, I’d argue they’re still available, but maybe more difficult to find in terms of scale and likely more expensive. So, you know, there’s plenty of discounting that.

More from what you have versus growing and kind of balancing the CapEx and the OpEx and looking at a at a total ROI. Great. I understand that really over 80% of our new rollouts are going to be a question. So we’ve had 20 megawatt site operating in the Greater Atlanta area now for probably ongoing almost three years. So we become very in tune with running a emerging facility.

The cost of the CapEx has also come down to almost the same amount per megawatt building and physical facility. So it’s really gonna come down to, you know, as I said, ROI. Right? We completely scrapped our site and put margins. ROI is not gonna look as good as if we have this just a lot of dirt there and build from the graph out, particularly with some of the indications that’s going on, Emergent now where they actually have mobile units.

So we can have those manufactured off-site. We just need to run copper wire, maybe throw down a concrete slab. And so so the time, the energy station, and and construction is the best, which which we really like. Also, the everything on emergent is that, you know, the emergent deposit we have, like, we have some running in state of Wyoming right now. Pretty much put on a pad, fill it with emergent liquid, pump the machines, lock it up, put fence around it, maybe have a security guard, and then you can control it from, you know, another data center or or or not headquarters.

So it’s it’s very labor labor light. They’re it’s such a stable environment that you really don’t need to take machines out of the liquid. Again, it’s you know, we really see that this is really the evolution of cooling because the the chips can only get so thin and so much space between chips as as you know, which means that the fans, air cooling can only do so much to actually just take that heat. So margin is where we think it is the industry is going, and we’re leaning heavily to that. Right.

Tyler, you you mentioned Texas. In in terms of geographic footprint, it it does seem like many mining roads lead to Texas. What what makes the state so well suited to decline mining? Yeah. I I think one of the things that investors maybe don’t have a full appreciation for when you’re evaluating decline mining is the value of this power usage in that is really the only large scale user of power as an industry that is so instantly prescalable.

And, you know, at first, I I think most investors don’t pay much attention to value in that. So a large part of what Cypher is, and I would argue, distinguishes us from our competitors is realizing the value of that curtailability. So again, I’m sure most of this room probably knows this, but, you know, power grid needs to be stable, which needs to be managed, and and supply and demand, and that becomes a complex thing. To overgeneralize and oversimplify this, in Texas, it’s its own power grid, and it made a good supply and demand for price signal. So you can have prices be virtually free or even negative to balance the grid and to for large parts of of the time, and then see power prices spike a thousand back in five minutes.

If maybe it’s a day when the wind and the sun is going down and it’s summer and everyone’s running their air conditioner, so there’s tons of demand. And so that price signal is how to get more supply incentivized to come on and demand to come off. And so, for us, it’s the distribution of those prices that if you look at the average price in Texas, it’s it’s not competitive, but it’s know, there are other states that are cheaper if it’s just gonna power a % of the time. The way we operate our entire fleet is we never run our fleet a % of the time. We monetize this curtailment so that the distribution of prices in Texas are such that 5% of the time, the prices are really high and maybe not economical for Bitcoin mining.

The other 95% of the time, they might be near zero. And so if you just chop off kind of 5% of the time, you can drastically reduce that price. And then that enables sort of knock on things that you can hedge the power, you can sell the power back to the grid, you can trade connections to move power around the grid, which all is kind of in our DNA. We have a lot of Wall Street and cipher, and and hedging and managing that power is, like, a huge part of what we do in Texas is a unique focus for that. Gary, know you have a different view in terms of your geographies.

Yeah. So we we operate in Fort Smith, Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Wyoming. And everything’s hard to think about it being a a scalable load is is right, and it’s one of the distinct advantages of of Bitcoin mining. And in the grid and its power, we can shut down in a matter of one to two minutes. But our approach is, you know, we really like to focus on rural America and partnering with these rural communities.

We bring a lot of a lot of capital to these communities through taxes, sale taxes on hospitals as well as the margin. And we’re talking, like, you know, populations of 10 to 15,000 or less, a number of communities we operate in. But but what’s important is that, you know, in our in our demand response programs that we have and and our agreements, at least most of the agreements, maybe a 20 a year, we might have to turn down because we need that power for their local citizens. And those are times that we wouldn’t run anyway. Right?

Because power prices might go up, you know, five, ten x. You know, it’s 50¢ a kilowatt hour, a dollar kilowatt hour. We’re not gonna be profitable anyways. So we turn down. That allows the grid and local municipality really to keep the the prices as low as possible because we’re run through that.

They have to now import power, which means that they’re probably paying higher prices anyways if they take an ounce. And so it’s just that end up getting burned at the end of the day. Plus, if if we were allowed the municipalities to keep most of that margin rather than importing that from elsewhere, that could account for 20% to 30% of our cash flow or profitability per year. So significant dollars and and plus we see this partnership. Right?

We can go in, we can get power at the cheapest rate possible, and then be completely curtailed once possible to to allow in their their share of profits. Great. Well, I know we’re about out of time, but but, Jeff, I wanna ask one question on geographic geography for you, which is how do think about international geographies? Yeah. I know you have operations outside of The US.

Yeah. Look. Think we see we see a lot of value I mean, obviously, we’re in Texas. We’re in Tennessee.

We’re we’re in a lot of The US markets, you know, right now. But we are probably the most globally diversified miner. We’ve got 20 megawatts that’s out in Norway, and then we have another state coming on in in Bhutan. We did just to Africa for the 50 megawatt site in Ethiopia. So, you know, we we see a lot of advantages of having geographic diversification.

I mean, one just kind of played out, you know, more recent years. And, you know, we had the the tariff situation. We’re getting ready to to ship a lot of miners to to Texas, and the tariff stocks up, and we’re able to essentially reroute those to Pukan and Norway, and we’ll just kinda re swap those in in there. So I think you can plug the possibility beyond just the energy price and the energy, you know, looking at stable political regimes is is is important to us. And, you know, I think there’s just a lot more international mining kind of issue.

Great. Well, we’re out of time. Thank you to all three of you for joining us here. It’s very interesting discussion. Always

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.