Cipher Mining at H.C. Wainwright: Strategic Insights into Bitcoin and AI

On Tuesday, 09 September 2025, Cipher Mining (NASDAQ:CIFR) participated in the H.C. Wainwright 27th Annual Global Investment Conference. The event highlighted the company’s strategic positioning in the evolving landscape of Bitcoin mining and data centers, with a focus on integrating high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. While the potential for growth in these sectors is substantial, challenges such as securing low-cost power and navigating national security concerns remain.

Key Takeaways

• Companies are shifting from traditional Bitcoin mining to diversified models incorporating HPC and AI.
• Securing low-cost power and efficient data center designs are critical for competitiveness.
• Bitcoin mining can aid in grid stabilization and act as an interruptible load for utilities.
• The convergence of Bitcoin mining and AI/HPC is leading to new business models and market players.
• National security concerns around data center ownership and power infrastructure were discussed.

Operational Updates

• CleanSpark: Matt Schulz emphasized their expertise in distributed energy resource management, operating 50 exahash across 33 data centers. Their vertical integration and strong community relationships are key assets.
• Mara Holdings: Salman Khan highlighted their 1.7 gigawatt capacity and multi-gigawatt pipeline, leveraging their position as the second-largest corporate Bitcoin holder.
• Cypher Mining: Tyler Page focused on securing low power costs and preparing for HPC demand, with 450 megawatts ready for deployment.
• Galaxy: Brian described their transition of the Helios site to an AI and HPC data center, with an 800-megawatt capacity and additional 2.7 gigawatts applied for.
• Hut 8 and American Bitcoin: Asher discussed their focus on building power infrastructure at scale and simplifying complex business models for investors.
• Bit Digital/White Fiber: Sam Tabar shared their shift from Bitcoin mining to HPC, emphasizing their retrofit model for faster, cheaper data center buildouts.

Future Outlook

• AI and HPC Integration: Salman Khan of Mara Holdings noted the importance of AI and modular approaches in the next five years, with a focus on edge inference.
• Curtailability and Grid Stabilization: Tyler Page of Cypher Mining highlighted the value of Bitcoin mining’s curtailability as the data center industry evolves.
• Security and Ownership Concerns: Matt Schulz of CleanSpark raised concerns about Chinese ownership of block space and data centers in the U.S.
• Market Expansion: Brian of Galaxy predicted significant growth in the data center market, with opportunities for companies to find their niche.

Conclusion

For a more detailed understanding of the discussions and strategic insights shared at the conference, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - H.C. Wainwright 27th Annual Global Investment Conference:

Unidentified speaker, Host: Hi. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you very much for coming to the HCW conference this year.

This is the most highly anticipated event of all of our crypto stuff. The Bitcoin mining panel, of course, we’re gonna talk about HPC and how business models evolve, and it’s my honor to introduce Russell Khan who’ll be who’ll be moderating the panel. I I used to do it long time ago, but it’s, you know, way above my pay grade now. And you’ve got a better man here. I’ve known him for years covering Core Scientific.

He’s phenomenal. This is Core Scientific is one of the many companies he’s founded. He’s still a chief development officer there. And most importantly, he’s probably the best emcee at any pool party. Take it away, Russell.

Russell Khan, Moderator, Core Scientific: That’s thanks, guys. I’m gonna we we got a short time here because I’m between you guys and and president Bush and all that, but I wanna get started. I’m just gonna kinda go down the list on this. We have a couple questions that everyone’s Then we’ll dive into specifics around the business models each each company has here.

But first off, just please give a quick introduction of yourself, your company, your your capacity in the company. Talk about your your specific operating strategies your company was founded on and how that has evolved over the years, either because of new tech or changes in tech or changes in strategy. And then just if there’s been any kind of things around, HPC demand, how those kind of things might have changed as well. But just a quick introduction, Matt. Matt, start us off.

Matt Schulz, Cofounder, Chairman, and CEO, CleanSpark: Thank you, Russell. Great to be here, everybody. My name is Matt Schulz. I’m the cofounder, chairman, and CEO of CleanSpark. We operate 50 x a hash across 33 data centers in four states.

Our our business is interesting because we we joined we got into the Bitcoin space through energy. We owned a series of portfolio patents on distributed energy resource management. So we built microgrid solutions and worked in conjunction with military bases and embassies around the world. And so that kind of fundamental working knowledge of of energy really helped us in the Bitcoin mining space because as everyone knows, that’s our biggest input. Our as far as evolution, we’ve we I think we fancy ourselves as as experts at land and expand, and we identify opportunities in utility markets regionally and build relationships and grow from there.

And what that’s presented us with is a portfolio of assets that have tremendous value for the Bitcoin mining ecosystem, but also lend value to potentially other types of compute.

Russell Khan, Moderator, Core Scientific: Thanks. Alman?

Salman Khan, Chief Financial Officer, Mara Holdings: Hi. Good afternoon, everybody. Salman Khan. I’m the chief financial officer for Mara Holdings. Mara has evolved over a period of time, to use the term that we use, and it’s we we we own and operate approximately 60 exahash today and control about 1.7 gigawatt worldwide.

We we we operate in four continents and have 15 data centers worldwide. Our story has evolved over a period of time. We used to be an asset light company just two years ago. And last year, we ended up buying 800 megawatts at half the cost of build multiple. And as a result of that, we converted our asset light model to 70% owned and operated, thereby reducing our operating costs or our electricity cost per coin as one of the lowest in the sector.

We while we did that, we did not stop there. We also bought generation of electricity. We’re not a utility company, just to be clear, but we like when we can marry intermittent power that is low cost and combine that with Bitcoin mining, and and that makes it so much you know, after every four years of having, we don’t have to worry about the costs and and the global hash rate when we marry the Bitcoin mining with with wind farms, for example. We own more than a 100 megawatts generation capacity in Texas. We also recently announced investment in Xion.

Xion is a subsidiary of EDF, world’s largest one of the world’s largest clean energy utility company, and we’re they’re focused on as a tier four data center operator. They have sites in Canada and in France, and their model is is primarily focused very different from traditional AI colocation service here in The US. They’re focused on sovereign or edge compute. We’re very excited about that. That’s expected to close by end of this year.

All in all, a global footprint, great people that we’ve been able to attract to our company. I’m very excited to be here in this room with with some awesome panelists here.

Tyler Page, CEO and Founder, Cypher Mining: Okay. Tyler? Hi, everyone. I’m Tyler Page. I’m the CEO and founder of Cypher Mining.

We are a data center development company. We began life as a greenfield developer of Bitcoin mining sites about five years ago. We secured power contracts and built from dirt our own first five data centers where we are operating 477 megawatts for Bitcoin mining today. That produces about 23 exahash. We have typically the lowest power costs of any company in the space.

We’ve been very focused on securing low power costs in that business with a very efficient fleet. What we have found ourselves in the middle of over the last, I’d say, year or so, and we’re not unique up here on this panel, is a position where we were securing and developing large power interconnects for years before that became to be in such high demand because of the rise of large language models, HPC, and the and the desire for hundreds of megawatts at a single data center. I’d say about a year ago, we really aggressively positioned ourselves, on the thesis that we could have very large interconnects in more remote locations, and the traditional HPC data center world would would migrate to us. We’re in the middle of that right now. We have 450 megawatts that is ready to go with a substation currently electrified, waiting for tenants, and we’re having lots of discussions around that.

So I think when we do this meeting next year, we’ll have a very robust HPC business to discuss, and, it is complemented very well by our existing mature Bitcoin mining business. Alright. Brian?

Brian, Co Head of the Data Center Business, Galaxy: Sure. Thanks, Russell, and thank you, HC Wainwright, for throwing this conference. I’ve had a lot of very valuable conversations over the last couple of I co head the data center business at Galaxy. Galaxy is a little bit of a unique company in that we have two large operating businesses underneath the parent company. The first and the one that we traditionally were better known for was the digital asset business.

This business has a large global markets business, which includes a derivatives business, you know, a market making business, a very large trading business kind of generally, and a lending business, as well as sort of a boutique advisory firm. We also have an asset management business, which has about $6,000,000,000 in AUM and a staking business that has another $3,000,000,000, a little bit more than that, on platform under stake for a little over $9,000,000,000 in assets on our platform. The other business, which is a little bit newer, is the data center business, and that’s what I’m the co head of. This came out of our Bitcoin mining business that we’ve been operating for several years. In particular, we focused on our asset, Helios, which is in the Panhandle region of West Texas near Lubbock.

We made the decision early last year to transition that business from a Bitcoin mining business to a traditional data center business, and we signed first one lease agreement with CoreWeave covering about 200 megawatts of gross capacity, followed by a second lease with CoreWeave, which was an incremental 400 megawatts of gross capacity, and CoreWeave is also committed for the final 200 megawatts of the 800 megawatts that we have approved for at that campus. So we’re currently building out that campus right now, and we plan to energize in q one of next year. That’s the business that, of course, is a little bit more similar to the other types of businesses that my panelists up here are also running.

Russell Khan, Moderator, Core Scientific: Thank you. Asher?

Asher, CEO of Hut eight, Executive Chairman of American Bitcoin, Hut eight, American Bitcoin: Cool. How’s going, everybody? My name’s Asher. As of, I guess, last week, I help run two publicly traded companies. One is Hut eight, which I’m the CEO of, and the other one is American Bitcoin, which I’m the executive chairman of.

So Hut eight is a business that we had merged. We founded a company called US Bitcoin Corp. We merged into Hut eight, and then I took over in the leadership role beginning of last year. When we started kind of the business, the thesis behind Hut eight is that as technologies continue to develop and advance and kind of push humanity forward, their reliance and their consumption of power has ever increasingly gone up. And so how do we build a company at the intersection of energy and of technology?

And how do we harness an electron to push advanced technology forward, to push humanity forward. And so at Hut eight, we see ourselves as what we call kind of a next generation energy infrastructure platform, and how do we build campuses for any net new technologies that have large demands of power. So that was where we started, which was kind of Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin computing, securitizing the Bitcoin blockchain. Today, obviously, like many of the folks up here, tons of demand around traditional tier three AI data centers for AI computing use cases, primarily training inference in some locations as well. I think for us, a big inflection point last year was when CodeTwo invested into the company, and our institutional shareholder base kind of grew exponentially at that time.

And we started having really two groups of shareholders, one that believed in kind of the long energy data center thesis and the other one that was kind of core to Hut eight. Hut eight was one of the first publicly traded companies that held Bitcoin on the balance sheet. I think the first, the old, CEO likes to tell me, but, like, and so you have this kind of core Bitcoin audience and shareholder base. And what we realized was that those businesses ultimately had very, very different types of capital cost of capital. At Hut eight, our goal is to drive volatility down and to lower our cost of capital.

Whereas on the Bitcoin side, you monetize that volatility via, for example, convertible notes. You see kind of MicroStrategy having successfully implemented that strategy, and the goal is to keep vol to be able to sell volatility. And so, ultimately, we didn’t see that these were two kind of asset classes that should live within the same capital stack, and so we decided to spin out American Bitcoin into its separately run company. And so the way to think about it is American Bitcoin is an anchor tenant of low redundant data center capacity for Hut eight. And so Hut eight is long energy, and American Bitcoin is long Bitcoin.

And so Hut eight is today, we have about a gigawatt of capacity under management. 90% of that is contracted. About 30% of that is power generation facilities we own. 70% of that is data centers primarily supporting Bitcoin. Compute, we have five traditional retail colo data centers in Canada that are smaller as well.

And then we have about 1.5 gigawatts of owned land and power agreements in net new development sites that we’re expanding into right now. And then with American Bitcoin, we really kind of took a first principles approach of why do investors historically invest in Bitcoin mining businesses, why are they investing into these treasury accumulator businesses. I think ultimately, it’s to get a levered kind of exposure to the underlying asset class. And so we kind of branded the company as a Bitcoin accumulator. It’s not looking to be a mining company.

It’s not looking to be a treasury company. It’s not focusing on how many XAhs we have. It’s not focusing on how many Bitcoin we have, but the ultimate goal is to increase Bitcoin per share, and that’s kind of the ultimate metric, and we have a multipronged strategy in doing so. And so I think it’s been a fun journey, and we’ll talk a lot about the data center side on the panel today.

Russell Khan, Moderator, Core Scientific: Thank you. Sam?

Sam Tabar, CEO of Bit Digital, CEO of White Fiber, Bit Digital, White Fiber: So my name is Sam Tabar. I’m CEO of Bit Digital. I’m also CEO of White Fiber. A couple of years ago when ChatGPT came out, we had sort of an epiphany moment that this is gonna be huge. And we were really turned off by the Bitcoin mining business, especially because of the halving, which is basically your your profits are basically cut in half every four years, which we thought was a crappy business model.

So we abandoned Bitcoin mining, and we focused on HPC. We landed our first cloud customer in early twenty twenty four, January 2024 for a $150,000,000 contract over three years, and we now have 23 customers. Our revenues are about a $100,000,000 per year. Backing that is a portfolio of four data centers across Canada and The United States. We also have a partner in Iceland.

That HPC business was doing so continues to do so well that we decided to IPO that business just last month, about thirty two days ago. And so we IPO ed that. That’s called White Fiber, Ticker is Wi Fi. And with respect to RemainCo, that being BitDigital, we sold all our Bitcoin. We stopped investing in the Bitcoin mining business, and we became the theory of treasury strategy.

And so that’s what BitDigital is now, a pure play strategy, but we do own 71.5% of white fiber. And for us, our our vision is that we think the two largest story arcs of our time is Ethereum and artificial intelligence. And so Bit Digital is an ETH play and owns 71.5% of a very successful company called White Fiber, which is a pure play on AI, and that’s the position we like to be in.

Russell Khan, Moderator, Core Scientific: Thanks, Sam. I’m also for the sake of time, we’re gonna I’m gonna combine the next two questions. I want everybody to have a chance to answer them, though. Okay? What are your company’s strongest assets?

Why do you see them that way? Has your opinion of that changed over the last eighteen to twenty four months? And then how do you think investors perceive your company? Particularly, what’s the thesis on why investors what kind of exposure are they getting to their company? I’ll start again with Matt.

We’ll go down. And then after that, we’ll dive into some individual questions for each of you depending on your strategies.

Matt Schulz, Cofounder, Chairman, and CEO, CleanSpark: You’re not making this easy. We

Russell Khan, Moderator, Core Scientific: I would I would

Matt Schulz, Cofounder, Chairman, and CEO, CleanSpark: say the strength of our company is is the team of people that we’ve assembled. We’ve been we we’re we’re very fortunate in the fact that we have 50 exa exa hash across 33 data centers, just over a gigawatt of power under management, and we’re able to manage to the industry’s one of the top two most efficient fleets with the top two most efficient uptime. So our our our personnel, the team that makes that work is is really the lifeblood of what we do. And we’ve we’ve created this opportunity for growth by making commitments to rural communities throughout The United States where previously there may have been a textile manufacturer or some other industry that has subsequently been offshore. And so these towns that bonded their their their share of development and distribution of electricity are now sitting on unmonetized megawatts.

So we create relationships whereby it’s mutually beneficial for both the city, who’s our utility, and for our for our company. And that really has grown over the years as a result of the relationships that we’ve developed. So, you know, how how have I seen that change? Well, we you know, we’re unique, I think, amongst all of our peers in that, you know, not only are we fully vertically integrated as a self miner, we own and operate our facilities and a quarter of a million Bitcoin mining machines, but we also have, I think, the top six or seven largest treasuries of Bitcoin of any publicly traded company. And it’s important to note that we mined each and every one of those Bitcoin.

We’ve never we’ve never borrowed money to buy Bitcoin or sold equity to buy Bitcoin. So we’ve we’ve got a very strong balance sheet. We put up a convertible a bond a year ago, $650,000,000, 0%, converts up a 100 with a share buyback. So we’ve been very disciplined with our capital strategy, and we like to say that we operate at the intersection of capital efficiency, capital stewardship, and operational excellence. And so, you know, our our our people are really key.

Now how do I see that changing? We when we entered the Bitcoin mining space, our first two locations were in Metropolitan Atlanta. We have College Park, which has a total of about a 100 megawatts of capacity, and then a second facility in Norcross, which is about 20 megawatts of capacity. Both of those facilities, we acquired them, were traditional data centers. So we actually entered the Bitcoin mining space through acquiring operating data centers and subsequently fired all of our customers to convert those to Bitcoin mining.

The opportunities have now changed because we’ve found ourselves with the ability to deploy very rapidly. We secured a 100 megawatts in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the other bidder on that project was Microsoft. Well, why on earth would a utility pick a company like CleanSpark over Microsoft? And the simple answer was we were able to monetize those megawatts within sixty days where to build out a proper data center, to Microsoft’s level is a four year process. So what we found is that we can enter these jurisdictions.

We can put up Bitcoin mining, and now we have a unique opportunity with the geographic diversity that we have that we can now create meaningful relationships with other data center development companies Mhmm. To build data centers while we’re monetizing the megawatts through Bitcoin mining. And if and when the time comes to shut down the Bitcoin mining assets to flip those traditional two traditional data centers, high performance compute, artificial intelligence, whatever the case may be, we can then duplicate those efforts. Now in in Cheyenne, Wyoming, we we went from scraping the ground to having having six megawatt immersion cooled pods deployed and hashing inside of six months. So that efficiency and speed to market is a huge differentiator.

And through some of the relationships that we’ve developed, it’s been very clear that there’s demand for that because there are megawatts that have been paid for that exist that they’re doing nothing until they’re monetized. So we find that it’s a very unique relationship. And the last thing I’ll say about that question, when we had the opportunity to attend the ProtoMiner launch at Russell’s facility in Dalton, we as as we left there, the the the chairman of the local utility grabbed Gary and Harry and myself and wanted to have a conversation because, obviously, there’s a ton of demand for compute energy. The challenge that they’re seeing in the state of Georgia, particularly, is that they forward sold power. So with all this increased demand, I I don’t think they contemplated five years ago that all these megawatts that were previously allocated for textile manufacturing would would be soaked up very rapidly by compute opportunities.

So what they’re now lacking is the flexibility or an interruptible load. And so in many of these jurisdictions throughout Georgia, we have a distinct advantage because we can provide up to two hundred hours a year of power backed utility based on demand, allowing them a lot more flexibility acting as a shock absorber. So now that we’re seeing a tremendous amount of inbound inquiries, specifically for the Metro Atlanta facilities as an example, We have a unique position in that we can blend traditional compute, high performance compute with Bitcoin mining to provide that shock absorber, that interruptibility on the network and provide a mutual benefit to the to the community. So I think I answered all those questions, but we’re, we’re really excited about what the future looks like for the combined enterprise.

Russell Khan, Moderator, Core Scientific: Thank you. Salman?

Salman Khan, Chief Financial Officer, Mara Holdings: Well, Mara is, with the 1.7 gigawatt capacity that we own control today and and the multi gigawatt pipeline. We believe the biggest asset for us is a combination of the electrons that we own and control that can be utilized for Bitcoin mining today or AI in future. Our goal is to maximize our profit dollar profit per megawatt hour, whether it’s Bitcoin mining or whether it’s AI inference on the edge. So that’s that’s one aspect of it, but I wanna reflect a little bit on what Matt mentioned about people. People is one of the most important things for us, and we’ve been fortunate to have attracted one of the best talents in in in our sector when it comes to our management team, when it comes to people in the field, in operations who are running on a day to day basis, and also at the board of directors.

We’re fortunate to have attracted some really serious talent. Our company is, is not run founder run. We are all hired help, and all of us have done, some really interesting things in our prior lives, whether it’s technology industry. Our CEO spent forty years in tech. I spent two decades in oil and gas and renewable energy and energy transition space.

And the lot the the the resume continues across the board, and the people is an important part of our story. Why do I say that? It’s not just the electrons. You need smart minds to con convert that electron into value, and that’s where the real value is created for us, where where you take smart people, for example, to give you an example. Somebody mentioned this is a difficult industry.

I think Sami mentioned a few moments ago. It is a difficult industry to operate in. Nothing’s easy. It’s not easy to make money, especially when there are four every four years there’s halving happening. So how do we plan that from a long term perspective?

Creative minds coming together, we looked at wind farms, and we found opportunities to acquire wind farms and cents to the dollar because of the market conditions where it exists today with wind farms. And the marginal cost to produce those electrons is close to zero because all you need is a person or two to monitor the wind farms. When the electricity is generated from those wind farms, we consume that electricity for generating Bitcoin. And, yes, it’s not a hundred percent twenty four hours a day, but it’s marginal electricity at almost zero cost to produce. And those are the kind of innovative ideas that come out not just from electrons, but having smart people in the room.

Thirdly, an important aspect, we we are the second largest holder of Bitcoin worldwide in corporations. And I say that with conviction. We are not a treasury company like Strategy and others, but we do hold a large stack of Bitcoin that that we’ve held for a long duration of time. We’re in a full huddle position since last year. We made that decision as a capital allocation decision, and we’ve continued to hold Bitcoin since then.

We also have a treasury operation within within our company, some very smart people who know how to create value out of Bitcoin, not just fold it, but also create a yield around that. So all in all, in summary, it’s not just one asset. It’s a combination of different things, and it’s it’s a difficult space to operate, but it there’s value to be created for people who can think out of box.

Russell Khan, Moderator, Core Scientific: Excellent. Right? Or, Alec?

Tyler Page, CEO and Founder, Cypher Mining: So I’ll give an unoriginal answer, but I promise I’m gonna put an original spin on it. Okay? I’m sure everyone’s gonna say that their team is their greatest asset, and, of course, that’s what I was gonna say, and I would have said it first if I were sitting down there, but I was late to the stage. However, I do have an original angle to think about it. So this is an equity research conference.

Thank you to everyone. I see some familiar faces in the room that met with me yesterday. I had one on ones all day. As always, HCW puts on a great conference with a great crew of investors to speak with. I think the one thing I found that I wanna remind everyone about our stock, if you’re looking at Cypher, is that, of course, I’m gonna argue we do have the best team in industry, but let me tell you why that matters to you, and I think investors would be well served to evaluate any company at this conference on this on this front.

What I have found is that too many investors in this space are looking at each of these companies as sort of like a bag of assets that they wanna come up with a present value on and then say, is this stock cheap or rich? And that’s a wonderful value framework to think about investing. Okay? I wouldn’t I I think that’s a wonderful place to start. The thing I would encourage you to remember and certainly I think applies to our company is that if you look at our team, we are where we are because we have a team that is particularly strong at originating great power contracts and building great data centers.

We have, give or take, a dozen ex Google data center employees on our staff, including basically our entire construction and operations team. Okay. So we we also have a person who I think is the greatest originator of the strongest power contracts in the space. And the thing I remind people of is that we’ve got a wonderful Bitcoin mining business. You can have a view on that and value it.

Kevin or Mike can give you a framework to help think about it from the HCW perspective in terms of what things are worth. We also, hopefully, will have a series of HPC contracts where we’re doing colocation, where you can come up with your version of the execution discounts and the net present value. The thing I’d encourage everyone to remember is those awesome people that originated the 11 data center sites we have now still come to work every day. We’re gonna buy more sites, and we’re gonna do more contracts, and we’re gonna build more things. And part of what you’re trying to do as an equity investor is think about what is that upside?

What’s the the sort of cheapness of the upside option in front of this massive wave of change that’s coming into this space? So what I would try to convince you of for Cypher that’s differentiating is, yes, it is their team that is our greatest asset, but I would argue it makes us the most attractive to an equity investor in terms of that upside potential that is created by this current marketplace. Told you I could try to be original. Thank you. Brian?

Brian, Co Head of the Data Center Business, Galaxy: Yeah. My my answer is sort of straightforward, which is that we are building a massive data center campus, and that campus itself is our most valuable asset. So we acquired this asset, which we call Helios, back in 2022. We purchased it because there was a massive amount of power that was available there that was already approved that could come online very quickly. We thought about that in the context of Bitcoin mining.

You could mine Bitcoin reliably and inexpensively, but it was then very validating to us when early last year, we pivoted the site into an AI and HPC site, and we’re looking for tenants. We marketed that site to CoreWeave as well as hyperscalers, and the response was the same regardless of who we shared that with, which is, like, you’re sitting on, you know, a pile of gold in this site. 800 megawatts at a single campus with already immediately available power where we’ve already procured long lead time equipment was just incredibly valuable to these guys, and it was easy to set up site visits after that. We then chose to work with CoreWeave, and we’ve been scaling up site from from there. I will touch on the people component as well.

I think the unique thing about Galaxy is that we are very diverse companies. So my team has a lot of smart and experienced people on it, and they’re thinking about data centers every single day. But we also have a lot of different pockets of experience in the data in the digital asset space that we’re able to leverage, which has been very useful when looking at pieces like financing or looking at new opportunities or identifying new risks that maybe we wouldn’t see if we just had a group of people thinking about data centers every day. The last piece on on our campus as well that I do wanna highlight is not only do we have those 800 megawatts available now, but we also have an incremental 2.7 that we have applied for and we are waiting for approval for. So upon approval of that, we really believe that this asset can be one of the largest data center campuses in the world, and we’re well underway in in getting there with a q one enter energization.

Russell Khan, Moderator, Core Scientific: Thanks, Brian.

Asher, CEO of Hut eight, Executive Chairman of American Bitcoin, Hut eight, American Bitcoin: Cool. I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned since we became public is the more you do as a company that like, we trade anywhere between, call it, 2 to $3,000,000,000 in any given day. The more you do as a company that’s smaller on that kind of market cap size, the less time an an investor is willing to take to truly understand the business. So the more simple it is, the easier that people can go to understand the business. I think if you look at our company today, we have about a billion dollars of Bitcoin on the balance sheet.

Our equity stake in American Bitcoin is worth more than the whole company today in totality, plus we have the gigawatt of assets, 1.5 of net new assets. But I think long term, we’re like, the fortunate kind of place that we’ve been able to operate from is in financing a lot of these opportunities that are in front of us, we don’t need to raise net new capital. And so we’ve been able to take a much longer perspective on building the business and, honestly, haven’t really cared about short term share price. And as a result, I focus kind of heads down on what do we have to do and what foundation do we have to put in to actually build a strong business with a defensible moat. And I think there’s two areas when we think about defensible moat on the Hut eight side of the business.

The first, and Tyler, of piggybacking on what you said, is monetizing the gigawatt we have or the 1.5 gigawatts we just announced is great. But, really, to build a really meaningful company in the long term is being able to develop a flywheel of originating new sites, to developing those sites, and commercializing those sites. And I think renewable energy companies are a great example of that. They did that twenty years ago and built multi $100,000,000 dollar companies in doing so. And so I think do we have a differentiated mode and flywheel of generating net new opportunities, developing those opportunities, building those, and commercializing them.

So I think that’s kind of the first part. And I think we have experiences in different buckets from power generation and facilities that we own there. We own about 500 megawatts of behind the meter facilities that we run today as well, so deep experience there and then have pretty large front of the meter sites. We just announced 1.5 gigawatts with a gigawatt campus just a couple weeks ago. And so we believe the ability to continue to develop kind of that flywheel of net new growth.

And then the second is if you have the ability to find power, which we believe will become a scarcer and scarcer asset, then are you just in the business of selling kind of access to power, or do you have a right to actually build upon that power and build a visual infrastructure? And then the question is, what is your kind of defensible moat around building that infrastructure stack itself? I think in building a traditional tier three data center, like, there are a lot of very capable people in the world that have built these data centers. I mean, there’s no secret that there’s a set few firms that would be general contractor owners, A and E firms, MEP firms that design the majority of data centers, that help build the majority of data centers and and get hired. And so one area we spend a lot of time thinking about is, is there innovation that can happen on the digital infrastructure stack on the data center stack?

I think in mining, an area we prided ourselves in a lot was being able to develop high quality at a low cost. So most recently, we developed a site called Vega in Amarillo, Texas, which was a liquid cooled data center. And the thesis there was, can we develop a liquid to chip cooled data center for the Bitcoin business that had analogies to AI data centers, and can we sell a low redundant infrastructure stack at a lower cost to customers? I think what we learned from that piece so we built basically a 200 kilowatt per rack liquid cool data center for under $450,000 a megawatt. What we learned from that was customers cared about speed more than they cared about cost.

And so v two of that design that we’re working on is, can we design a form factor that starts with low redundancy, but we design it in a way and spend a little bit more money up front where we can actually upgrade it into tier three standard so we can deliver speed of power yet still use Bitcoin as the original on initial underwriting to be able to capture land and monetize land. And so I think there’s short term, which is build tier three data centers that people know what they look and feel like with counterparties that they trust and deliver those to markets, and we get some type of NPV on those cash flows. I think that’s right. Great. We’ll create a couple billion dollars of value of doing that.

But, like, long term, where is truly the bigger so what on, like, what gives us a right to compete in this space? And the two areas for Hut eight are the ability to procure power at scale and a continued ability to be able to do so. And second, a differentiated mode in designing and building data centers that is able to drive innovation around the infrastructure stack, either drive speed and or cost relative to quality. And so spending a lot of time doing those efforts, and I think, I don’t know, our conviction is that price will always catch up to intrinsic value over time. And as long as you don’t have to raise capital, it doesn’t really matter, and the market will work itself out.

Russell Khan, Moderator, Core Scientific: Thanks, Asher. Sam?

Sam Tabar, CEO of Bit Digital, CEO of White Fiber, Bit Digital, White Fiber: Yeah. Look. I think that the marker of a successful business is really simple. Do you have clients or not? So we have 23 clients, and the reason why we have 23 clients and growing is we have a very special approach to data center build out.

So we have what we call a retrofit model where we’re able to build two times faster and 40% cheaper. In fact, we just got this client called Cerebras. Some of you guys may have heard that. We identified a mattress factory back in February. We’re handing over the keys to them next week, and that is a that is a facility that we’re able to turn into a tier three data center in six months.

We are very allergic to greenfield. We think there’s a huge execution risk in greenfields that takes about eighteen months, and there’s a lot of moving parts on a greenfield. So we we focus on retrofits, which takes about six months. We just acquired a data center in North Carolina, 1,000,000 square foot facility in North Carolina that was a textile factory that has about 99 megawatts associated with it. We already have a whole bunch of LOIs attached to it.

And the reason why we have all these clients is because we could do it two times faster and 40% cheaper, and we have a track record of that. And the latest example of that is Cerebras where we’re handing over the keys to them next week. That thing used to be a mattress factory just six months ago. Alright.

Russell Khan, Moderator, Core Scientific: Thanks. Next question, and I’m gonna let someone who’s passionate about it give the first answer, we’ll see where we’re gonna go. Where do you see the data center industry in the next five years or in five years’ time, not the next five years, but in five years’ time, specifically as it relates to Bitcoin mining, which we’ll we’ll be after a half, HPC consumption, AI consumption, and then how that’s gonna interact with the utility grid, the global utility grid, but also the local utility grid. So that’s three very distinct things, but five years out. Who would like to take that?

Salman Khan, Chief Financial Officer, Mara Holdings: Well, I think Salmon? It’s a look. It’s when you look at Bitcoin mining, literally every US corporation that hold that does Bitcoin mining is talking about AI. Right? So it’s it’s certainly, AI is going to be an important play in the next five years.

When we talk about Bitcoin for after every halving, it becomes more difficult and cost cost is important. So being innovative as to how you mine Bitcoin is going to be important just like we talked about. Mara has been focused on finding opportunities where we can mine Bitcoin irrespective of what hash price does, irrespective of what global Hashrate does. That I think those innovations are going to be important in this sector to continue to evolve over a period of time. Modular approach to AI is going to be interesting.

When you think about current model of AI HPC with large scale models and large scale data centers being built with the reliance on one big customer, that’s that’s an interesting model for some, not for everybody. Mara has chosen not to follow that path. We we are more a believer of inference on on the edge. Mhmm. And that’s going to be important because there’s there’s when there’s data, there’s security.

Coca Cola doesn’t wanna share their information with PepsiCo. JPMorgan would not wanna share their information with Bank of America, for example. And that’s where Exxon is important in our story because we believe in the future that’s that’s a that that becomes a 170,000,000,000 market or TAM in the next four, five years or so that allows us the opportunity to tap that and have customers who are recurring, paying p over a period of time as a recurring revenue platform as a service model. The the other thing is that, you know, it’s it’s it’s it’s very important to note that tier four data centers I’m sure you can talk for hours about that. Tier four data centers are very different from picks and shovels like tier like Bitcoin mining, and you need a different level of expertise for that.

So over time, you would expect that people will learn and evolve over a period of time. So there’s a lot of learning and education when it comes to Bitcoin mining going into AI, you know, or software or or software as a service or ecommerce I’m sorry. Software or platform as a service. In terms of inference, as I had mentioned previously, we are subject to closing this transaction q four. Exion is a is a is an NVIDIA partner and GDPR certified, which means that they have access to compliance of data and also access to sovereign customers, and that’s the kind of stuff we believe is going to create value from a longer longevity standpoint.

Tyler Page, CEO and Founder, Cypher Mining: Russell, I think sorry. I’ll jump in real quick. I mean, I do think the curtailability of the Bitcoin mining load is extremely valuable as the data center industry evolves. By analogy, this is my second company I’ve been a part of founding in the Bitcoin space, and I used to travel around the world speaking to the world’s biggest institutional investors to convince them to buy Bitcoin. And none of them would do it because it’s like, well, I don’t want the reputation risk, and I don’t know.

And and and now, of course, everyone knows, like, Larry Fink is, like, one of the big cheerleaders for for Bitcoin. Right? It’s and and and I could have told you in 2018, 2017 that would eventually happen. I just didn’t know when it would happen because it was just so rational that it would happen. And I look at pairing Bitcoin mining with, HPC data centers, traditional data centers as the same thing.

I mean, you measure a a peak PUE. By definition, most of the time, the data center is not operating at that peak, and there’s extra power there. And so the ability for Bitcoin mining to soak up that excess and also work with the grid operators, to your question, to be able to, like, if they’re in a position where they have so many data centers, they have to be able to curtail part of a load. It’s very natural that the two eventually grow together. It’ll be interesting to see how we get there, but it seems inevitable at some point.

Asher, CEO of Hut eight, Executive Chairman of American Bitcoin, Hut eight, American Bitcoin: I think

Matt Schulz, Cofounder, Chairman, and CEO, CleanSpark: You know, I I agree with with what Tyler was saying about pairing those assets together, but, you know, I think there’s something that we we don’t talk about enough, and that is, you know, Salman’s company holds billions of dollars in Bitcoin, and Michael Saylor’s company holds billions of dollars in Bitcoin. And during the prior administration, there was a concerted effort to drive Bitcoin mining out of The United States. And I believe that providing and securing block space for those massive huddle treasury companies for American investors, for American, corporations that hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet is a national security issue. We had a a letter that was issued today, referring a couple of players in the space, Kango and Bitmain, to the to the Department of Treasury as a potential CFIUS risk, and they’re talking about the consolidation of Chinese ownership of the block space and Chinese sovereign ownership of data centers and energy assets within The United States as a security risk. So while we’re focused on maximizing the value of each and every megawatt that we control, 1.02 gigawatts currently under contract with 1.2 gigawatt pipeline spread over five states.

We believe that providing security and support to the blockchain is, in fact, a national security risk. And so there’s there’s a value in providing that function that I think has gone maybe unrecognized, and the Bitcoin mining space is really a challenge because each and every one of us, at some point over the last two cycles, have been the pretty girl of the dance. I mean, today, it’s Asher. Sometimes, you know, sometimes it’s somebody else. But as Bitcoin mining comes back into vogue, I think the companies that are that remain committed to operational excellence and capital stewardship are going to differentiate themselves because there’s absolute need to maintain that that support of the blockchain.

Asher, CEO of Hut eight, Executive Chairman of American Bitcoin, Hut eight, American Bitcoin: Yeah. And I look. I I agree on the securitization. I think on the question of kind of five years out from today, the question we always ask ourselves is just what is our right to to deliver this capacity? And I I think five years out for today, the question is going to be, what does the supply and demand kind of balance look like?

Today, if you have power and you have access to power, if you can execute on it, people can give you the the trust, then you can deliver a data center to them. The reality is every hyperscale self builds their own data centers, and that’s their preference if they can. I think you’ll see a lot more of these AI labs starting to self build these data centers as well. And so the question is, do they need additional demand and capacity than they can build themselves? And if so, they’ll sign colocation space just like they’re doing today.

And so the question is in five years is if that kind of supply and demand mismatch isn’t there, then what is the what can you deliver to them that they don’t have? Is there something unique on the infrastructure stack that you can deliver? Is there a price differentiation? Is it a cost of capital gain because you can drive lower cost of capital and you can deliver that relative to them building themselves? And so I think five years from today, if the power story and just being able to have

Like, when we started these conversations two years ago, you have access to one, two hundred megawatts. Great. People are interested. I think today, unless you have a minimum of 300 megawatts scaling up to a gigawatt plus, people have very low interest. And I think those bogeys will continue to increase, and those bars will get higher if they’re not self building and they’re building externally.

And so I think how we think about kind of the market is what is our competitive mode in building, finding power and building, be able to build power infrastructure at scale? And then secondly is on the infrastructure stack itself, how do you actually compete? I think thinking about kind of I think with a lot of training clusters, you’ll see them forced into curtailing. You’re not gonna have them up twenty four seven, three sixty five. A lot of the AI labs are already willing to start thinking about curtailability, and I think you’ll see that happening on training clusters.

And then in regards to Bitcoin mining, I really want us to continue to build and scale Bitcoin mining in The US. I think Bitcoin mining to just develop on its own underwriting in The US, unless you have some behind the meter, stranded power, curtailed power, low cost power, etcetera, situation, it’s hard to compete against other places that have much cheaper stranded power and are very cheap to build. And so as a result, like, I think on Hut eight, being able to underwrite a site for a longer term value of megawatts and then being able to have Bitcoin mining there and your underwriting is not purely on that use case, that’s how you can kind of justify. But overall, I think in in five years, all of these companies, I believe, up here will all find their niches and will find their competitive moats and will be different types of business that evolve and and change and target, a specific part of the market. And so, I think the demand cycles will change, and, companies will prove their value over time.

Brian, Co Head of the Data Center Business, Galaxy: Alright. Got thirty seconds to add to that. It’s it’s related. Yep. One piece, the data center market’s going to be significantly bigger in five years.

And then the point that Ashra said that I I totally agree with is that these campuses, are multi 100 megawatt campuses and at densities that we’ve never seen before. And so putting that together, we’re going to have a lot of new players in

Tyler Page, CEO and Founder, Cypher Mining: the market

Brian, Co Head of the Data Center Business, Galaxy: that are not thought of as traditional data centers today. Because the traditional data center companies, rather, have not built these types of campuses before, so and that’s where I do think there’s incredible opportunity for all of the companies on stage, just as Asher said, to find their niche.

Unidentified speaker, Host: Yeah. Alright.

Russell Khan, Moderator, Core Scientific: We could go on forever, but we’re between you and the president, so we have somewhere else to go. Thank you, everybody. Let’s give these guys a big hand.

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