$iren Earnings Preview 5.3.26

Hosted by @₿itcoin ₿utcher 🥩 🐑 🐷 · 2026-05-02 · Tags: IREN

TLDR

The speakers preview IREN's upcoming earnings and argue that accelerating AI compute demand, scarce energized land, and rapid data-center execution create a major long-term opportunity. They are highly bullish about possible Microsoft or other hyperscaler deals, while acknowledging that weak quarterly headline numbers, financing needs, and unresolved GPU plans could trigger short-term volatility.

Speakers

Notable quotes

Transcript

₿itcoin ₿utcher: It's Sunday, it's 9.03. I wanted to give everyone enough time to join. This looks like who we're going to start off with. And let's talk about some iron. It's May 3rd, Sunday night. For some of you, it might be Monday morning if you're in Australia or Monday afternoon. And earnings are coming up this week on Thursday after hours. on May 7th. So a lot to talk about. I threw a few posts to the nests for contacts. I will kick this off on just a general overview of where we're at right now in the AI space and then it'll certainly turn to iron and people who want to come up. I'm hoping Franz can join later. Small cap was driving, but there's a lot of other smart, intelligent people in this community that have something to say and this is the place to do it. So this past week. I don't really talk about. where we've been as far as price action goes, because I honestly, this week can throw a wrench into it where anything can happen, everything's on the table, and I've communicated to people privately that depending on how things play out, we could not do so well if Dan weren't to deliver this upcoming Thursday, and that might not matter. In the short term, or I should say the long term, but what I would say to people who think that I'm too short term focused right now and emphasizing too heavily on this earnings, what I would say to you is we're trying to fund billions of dollars of CapEx and there's a lot of debt available, but part of managing your balance sheet is what's called a debt to equity ratio. So to the extent that we raise more debt, Iron likes to supplement it and have cash on hand. That's comes from equity, whether it's retained earnings, that's money that you make in the business that you keep, or they could issue an ATM like a $6 billion ATM that everyone is familiar with by now. But I think it's starting to make more sense why that $6 billion number was thrown around. And this is the part where I get positive and tell you that I am excited. I considered some pipe up video and all that, but I want this to be constructive and informative and not simply bull **** for lack of a better term. Like I think there are a lot of good pieces in place that show that we're headed in the right direction this week. But before I talk about Iron specifically, I want to first add my co-host Franz up, who's able to join. And then we're going to dive quickly into this past Wednesday. The hyperscalers announced earnings, and I jokingly call them the four or five families, but it was Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon that reported after hours, all of which the next day traded positively with the exception of Meta. But even Meta expanded their AI related CapEx. And it's the same talking points that have been discussed the past 6 to 12 months. It's Constrained compute, we need more power, and we're going to spend more. So I could go into the numbers and read off all of them, but that's a waste of everyone's time. All you should know is that demand for compute is accelerating, and it's harder to build infrastructure than ever because you could see multiple protests at sites, projects getting canceled, delays because of the supply chain. So it's comes down to which company is able to build data centers faster and plug in GPUs. And we're invested in iron because we believe we have that team. So it's good to get confirmation and it certainly impacts the price short term when you're looking at hyper earnings, but we already know what's going on. And then you take into consideration that the two main players in the space right now are privately held, whether it's OpenAI who kind of started all this, or now Anthropic, who's the new big bully on the block, who in the span of two years, not even at the beginning of 2025, I believe their annual recurring revenue estimate was $1 billion. That was raised to $9 billion and that was more recently raised to $30 billion. And as of Friday, my understanding is that was raised to $44 billion. So I guarantee you they cannot. Whether there's no way. in hell that 44 times the data centers can be built. And there will be token efficiency gains over time with the Vera Rubin coming out. But there's also going to be expansion and use cases. Like right now, these frontier models primarily rely on text for most of their output. And for enterprises, they're used for coding. But over time, you're going to see more audio, visual, and video files that require even more token usage to produce. So there's going to be this demand that's insatiable over the next few years at a minimum. And so what better place is there to be invested in right now? And I would argue none. and they can spew all the bubble ******** they want on CNBC, but it's just propaganda for people who aren't positioned properly. That's not to say that it's a straight line up. There's volatility along the way, and there's sometimes it's two steps forward before you take one step back. But again, I can't think of a better place to be positioned in right now for the next three to five years, let alone the next 10 to 20 years. I also posted the Nest tweet from Holger, cannot pronounce his last name. I'm assuming he's a European gentleman, but related to Morgan Stanley guidance on capital expenditures. And the stat that caught me and dropped my jaw was this idea that all these hyperscalers fewer than 10 companies, whether they're including OpenAI and Anthropic. I haven't read the chart too closely, but the idea is that a handful of companies or even 10 companies are going to outspend the rest of the S&P 500. So let's say it was 490 versus 10, 49 times the amount of companies are spending fewer dollars in capital expenditures. And all that money is concentrated into probably fewer than, you know, 20 or 30 some colocation providers or neo clouds. So again, what a great opportunity and how lucky are we to be in this space? Those were some of my opening thoughts. I'm going to kick it to Franz for a minute to see what if he had anything outside of iron that he wanted to discuss before we kind of jump in and no agenda really. It's obviously related to earnings. I'm happy to walk through some of the things I noted earlier in a post of what I'm looking at and maybe Franz, we can do that tag team back and forth and he can add some color or he's happy to just jump into it too. But let's go to Franz. Franz, good evening.

Frans Bakker: Hey, Butcher, what's up? Yeah, good introduction and exciting week ahead of us. So I am still stuck in the whole Microsoft prepayment story, so I will try to switch my mind to earnings, but certainly a lot to look forward to. I've just browsed through your earnings wish list, which is kind of funny because it goes from one to three. to four to five and then to seven and back to five. I don't know how you made this list or maybe you changed the order and forgot to alter the numbers, but it's, yeah, there are a lot of things that we are looking forward to and I think the Vera Rubin substitution clause thing is just, I wouldn't call it a bonus point, it's really something I expect a conclusion on and Other than that, yeah, all eyes on Monday or yeah, maybe Tuesday for potentially an announcement. I would say that we're still in, you know, the odds are pretty good of getting an announcement before earnings rather than at earnings. I think if they have no announcement this week before earnings, it will most likely not be a deal announcement at earnings, but All the signs are there. I mean, I think the run up to $54 was also something that we saw in January when we ran up to $60 out of nothing, but rumors. And I think the rumor mill is going strong and let's hope that it's The third time is a charm. So, yeah, I mean, obviously my focus is mostly Iron, so I don't have too much to report about OpenAI or about Anthropic, but I would say that I see Anthropic still as a most favorable, you know, hyperscaler degree customer for Iron and as a, and Google a second one. But I would not be opposed to OpenAI directly if there is, you know, if the economics are strong, obviously they have a large market share and they are willing to fight Entropic for more market share. So yeah, those are my initial thoughts. If you have any specific topic you want to cover, just shoot.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: I've added Marcos up. Marcos is one of our friends. I think he's Dutch based at Marcos. I'm a little disappointed that they've outlawed the advertising of meat in Denmark, so I kind of have a bone to pick to it with you, but we'll we'll address that in a separate conversation. But if you're available to speak, Marcos, since you're you might be time sensitive given it's so. late over there. How are you this evening? And did you have a question or did you have any thoughts you want to share?

Speaker 3: Hey, guys. Sorry to say it to you, Butch, but I have zero influence on the meat policy of Denmark.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: I wish you did because everyone, I don't know. I mean, now I understand why Frans left. So, but instead of bashing the Netherlands so much, Those of you who don't know, Marcos, very talented gentleman who's been with us for some time, who, given the challenges with the European time zone, doesn't have the chance to always join us. But if you haven't heard him before, this is going to be a treat. So what's on your mind, Marcos?

Speaker 3: Yeah, so two things, and thank you for the kind introduction. The first one strengthens your iron thesis of our iron thesis and the Neo Clouds infrastructure player thesis as a whole. I just sent it in your DM that I think you all know Zephire who works for Citrini. He just posted that Neo Clouds maybe we'll see a big re-rating because many are saying that in the industry. exactly based on what your introduction was on the big shortage on energized land and time to compute. So it's the first time that I've seen him shout that out. So this is very interesting. It's going to be a very interesting period for sure. I'm very curious on IRIN earnings and Yeah, same as Franz already said, I am looking forward for a conclusion on Vera Rubin. I personally don't think they will shift to Vera Rubin because of the four month clause and also the logistic hassle with switching the GB300 as I laid out in my post with Waddell and I think it was JP Morgan financed them for the below 6 interest rate, and they normally don't use that when assets can be repriced for such a low rate. So I currently, I think that they will stick to the GB300s, but yeah, this earnings call is definitely the moment to get some clearance on that, because if they don't talk about it now, I personally scrapped that scenario for this year in terms of probability.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: I appreciate that. I think those who aren't familiar, Iron's previous deal with Microsoft has the newest generation GB300s, but there's a newer generation that is about to come out over the summer into the fall called the Vera Rubin that I think the whole point of it is if they show the ability to upgrade, then that shows that they have the ability to procure these Rubens faster. And part of the criticism in the past on Iron remaining just a preferred partner of Nvidia is would that potentially compromise their ability to procure Vera Rubens while competitors like Coreweave in Nevius who have direct equity stakes, Nvidia does in those respective competitors, you know, do they prioritize their own ownership interests over iron? But it gets back to also do they have the liquid cooled capacity? And those are two third, I should say two neo clouds that rely upon co-location providers to find space. So is there enough liquid cooled capacity for them to service it? And but I think it's important for iron though, whether it's Horizon three and four or if it's we've speculated on Horizon five and six at Childress related to the drop in hash rate. meaning the Bitcoin miners are being taken down. And then there's rumors of mining halls being demolished for liquid cooled data centers, which most likely would be related to this newest generation called Verirubin. And I think the whole point of this is it's sometimes stock investor was in the comments, and had mentioned a good counter argument that the GB300s were going to see higher revenue sooner, which is proof through the financial statements that irons AI cloud. But I guess my counter argument to him would be even with delayed revenue, they have enough AI revenue coming from Canada or the rest of Childress with B300s if they retain the mining halls that I think there's something to be said about if you want to command a premium to the other colocation providers and or neo clouds and have an equal valuation, then you probably have to be showing the market that you're capable of handling the newest and greatest tech in the marketplace, which I have no reason to believe that Iron cannot perform and they even have flexible racks at Childress for the reason of being able to comply with the rack density of Vera Rubin. But until they're actually procured and installed, there's a burden approved for them. But Franz has his hand up. So what do you got, Franz?

Frans Bakker: I think it just comes down to the gap in delivery timeline between GB300 and VR200. So I think on the one hand, it's obviously the substitution clause is in place and Microsoft will look at it in a similar way that Iron looks at it. It's, you know, how much longer can we accept GB300 as an opportunity cost relative to VR Rubin, right? Because Yes, you will probably be waiting up to six months longer to receive Vera Rubens compared to GB300s that are supposed to be delivered, you know, in the second-half of this year. And the Vera Rubens will probably be delivered somewhere in the first half of 2027. But, you know, for both Microsoft as well as Iron, the later delivery of those Vera Rubens will be an initial slowdown in revenue for iron and tokens or compute for Microsoft, but it will catch up so quickly with a performance boost that you get out of a 100 megawatt IT cluster, you know, in Horizon three and four. And since we know these talks are ongoing for Horizon five and six, maybe there will be a new super, super cluster of 200 megawatt of IT loads between horizon three to six. I mean, at the same token, they could just decide that, you know, we will now only deliver Vera Rubin going forward. And that's why they are, you know, considering this now for horizons three to four. On the other hand, it could also be that Iron has agree to provide Microsoft with Vera Rubin for Horizon five and six instead of Horizon three and four. So I agree with Marcos that this earnings will be the, you know, the timeline for, you know, the last moment in time where I would say substitution clause will need to be discussed. I think if they won't talk about it, it won't be exercised. But I do think uh that if they won't talk about it they will certainly talk about Horizon five and six anyway so um I think that the Horizon five to six deal or anything with regards to uh combination with Horizon three and four and Vera Rubin will be my number one thing to look forward to this week um I I can't imagine they would stay silent around that um so yeah I think um It's just a GB300 is still, you know, it's available now. You see them left and right arriving. Firm is getting them. Iron is getting them. Nebius is showcasing them. Everyone is now having GB300s in their data centers. But, you know, at what point are they an opportunity cost with the increase in you know, both training and inference by 3.5 to 5x, you know. So I think it's probably something that we can't really predict, but I think the conclusion will be, you know, happening rather sooner than later.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Hey, Marcos, before we go to you, just to emphasize Branz's point, three to five times more efficiency in token production from the newest generation can't be understated. But I think what this gets back to is we've been relatively, there's been, I think I didn't address this earlier. It's kind of addressed in my posts, but I think people just want Dan to finally Lay it all on the table. Doesn't have to say every single thing they're gonna do with, say, Oklahoma or even Australia, but I think addressing their plan for the rest of Childress and Canada at a minimum and ideally some sort of introduction to what they plan on doing at Sweetwater would bring a lot of. confidence to not only the base, but also as people are trying to value iron and they see the pickup in revenue, they can begin to kind of imagine where this ride is going. But let's go back to Marcos.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I think Francis is a very good point on the inference part because if you look at the projections for Anthropic, they're mostly signing or pointing around to a 60-ish blended gross margin average for 2026 on inference. So scaling up to Vera Rubin in terms of token cost and token optimization would be a huge leap for every AI infrastructure provider. So I think it will be sooner than later. Yeah, like I said, probably not for Horizon 3 or 4, but later on. And what I'm also looking for, it won't probably be at the earnings call, but as you just saw what I DM'd you, the overview, I will be looking for partnerships for Aririn also in terms of also for Nabius, in terms of liquid cooling. As some of you guys maybe know, we just had a new team member at our team who works for 15 years in designing data centers and being an operational manager on data centers. And I had a long talk with him about liquid cooling and currently they're moving to from one phase to two phase liquid cooling. And that brings your PUE around 1.04 or 1.06 in terms of 1.15, 1.18 now. So the optimization of two-phase liquid cooling is pretty huge for companies like Iron who certainly look at the PUE also. So that's something, it's probably not on your list, but what I'm looking for for the next few months because I know some two-faced liquid cooling players are actively in, yeah, let's say prototype mode with some hyperscalers. So I'm very curious which one Iron will partner with because it brings you pretty huge operational benefits.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Marcos, let me ask you this. Do you the with is your understanding that two phase liquid cooling works that lower PUE works regardless of geography? So there's that does that negate like per right now air cooled data centers that iron runs in Canada run at a 1.1 PUE or even slightly below that. But whereas Texas, given the climate constraints, that might be closer to 1.3. And for those of you unaware with what PUE means, the long and short of it is a higher PUE is bad because you're using, you have less available power to plug in GPUs. So something you can look up outside of here. I won't waste everyone's time, but what's your understanding of that, Marcos?

Speaker 3: They use a different cooling gradient, which should work in any environment because the chemical specifications are different. And one of the most things that I also think will drive it is that if they currently have a cooling leak, it immediately affects the whole server or a whole part of the cluster. bringing up to 300 to 400 million potential in damage. And for all the guys watching this space, the data center business is probably is probably overtaking the aviation business around 2030 in terms of the highest premiums being paid in terms of insurance. So that's a big thing. That's a really big thing. And what I'm currently hearing around in the market is that If the adoption of two-phase liquid cooling goes as planned, it's probably also something that insurance companies all will mandate, or they will raise significant premiums on single-phase liquid cooling. Because the difference is so huge in terms of leakage risk and collateral damage that comes with it, together with overtaking aviation in 2030 as DC builders as number one insurance premiums paid. It's a huge thing for things like for all infrastructure players. So it's certainly something that all you guys should watch, in my opinion. And I'm, like I said, very curious who Iron will partner with.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: So It's a great outside topic that, besides the numbering of things I was looking at, as Franz pointed out, that also is neglected. And it's a great angle. And I think what I would say, Marcos, when you consider the new hire within the last few months of Jonathan Gross, the Chief Innovation Officer, of iron with a specialization in HVAC, so heating and ventilation, air and cooling, I got to think that that puzzle piece is starting to make more sense and actually plays into what you're speaking to. And as a result, iron has all this infrastructure. And for a lot of months now, Franz has been banging the drum of the opportunity costs of a megawatt And if you can maximize each and every megawatt, all 4.51 gigawatts that Iron has currently, let alone their development pipeline, but it's still a relatively scarce asset in this market. And if you can go from on the Microsoft deal, generating 9 to $10 million a megawatt to with Vera Rubin, you know, maybe 15 to 16 million a megawatt, And that could even go higher now if you're suggesting the PUE drops. So really interesting insight and I appreciate you bringing that up. But it also, I think it gets back to we've been frustrated since the November 5th high that we all had once the Microsoft deal was announced and everyone who sat through February 5th and there's the perceived lack of communication and all these things that I'm not necessarily trying to rehash to be negative as much as things are starting to make a little more sense. Looking backwards and the higher of gross is one thing I can point to. And today I Franz had mentioned that there's I don't have his name available, but a new capital markets vice president joining the team that most likely will team up with Anthony Lewis and create more shareholder friendly cap structures where they seek more debt. And I hope to hear about that. I just I was writing that list in my living room, just trying to put something out to get some pushback from people. or at least get people thinking in that direction. But that's another thing where the Lewis had mentioned on the prior call how the existing data centers, whether it's Horizon one being completed or even the Canadian data centers that are fully funded and paid for, can be you can attach a piece of debt to them and take out cash and recycle it into newer projects. So I think there's each hire has its own set of questions and there's it's just crazy to me what they're going to cover in this call because they're typically only, if I remember correctly, 30 to 45 minutes, yet there's so many different directions that they could go and. It's and I hope for that reason that they err on the side of putting out more press releases early in the weeks. You know, selfishly, we all want it for the share price, but it's also there's only so much time in that call. So how do you cover all of these topics? So I think it would be valuable to inform the market as much as they're willing to prior to Thursday so that everything is covered and nothing's neglected. But Marcos is back up.

Speaker 3: Yeah, I fully agree with you. And I think the hire you could extrapolate it a little bit to new AI. If you saw what new AI hired Ted, I'm not sure of his back name right now, but from Northland and he managed to secure really good financing for new AI in like 2 weeks. So Having someone coming out of the space like Macquarie, who has been consistent in funding projects in data center growth, could really mean short-term deals, in my opinion, for Iron in terms of financing. So it's something I look out for in the call also, and I agree with you that they will probably release a few things in the upcoming month because those projects can tend to move pretty fast lately. So I think it's a really good addition to the team to get the exposure with the more financing world.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: I was trying to pull up Franz's post from earlier really quickly just so that I give respect where it's due to the newest team member of Iron here. And that's coming up in one second, everyone. I appreciate your patience. But former Macquarie VP and that gentleman's name was James Escavira. Hopefully I announce that properly. But I think this gets back to the company currently has a few hundred megawatts monetized where they have a portfolio of thousands with, you know, their gigawatts and they're going to have to get more creative to scale this thing faster. If the famous time to compute is everything I, I think Will's a sharp guy, Dan's a sharp guy, but they had a lot on their plates. So they get some help from someone like Anthony Lewis. And now Anthony Lewis might need some help. So it's always good to have one more sharp person in the room with experience to help scale this and redefine their cap structure that historically is relied on ATM and convertible notes. But I my gut feeling is that now that they've front loaded a lot of this infrastructure and they have assets on their balance sheet that they can monetize with debt instruments and kind of take advantage of that, again, without taking on too much of a debt burden and interest rate burden. But it does, the space is favorable. I looked at a note earlier in the week that there's project level financing for like HUD's project. That's like a 16 year note, if I remember correctly, that's at the project level. So it actually isn't at the parent level, so it doesn't impact the rest of the business. So I think there's opportunities out there and interested to hear where they come about, but circling back to just kind of. I think one of the other topics, instead of going site by site, I think it just gets back to is Dan willing to be more aggressive? And I think people to play devil's advocate said maybe like, let's take Friday as an example. He posts the energization of Sweetwater. few hours or like right at close or right around, let's say four or five o'clock Eastern time. I think it was after market close. And then this is where it gets a little in the weeds. And am I reading too much into things or not? But for the sake of conversation, he posted at 7:59 Eastern time. the second follow up tweet talking about. So originally it was Sweetwater's energized and that's great. Well, the second tweet was, you know, now it's energized. Now it's time to for compute essentially. So I think personally, like I, I can understand why people would say you don't want to read too far into a tweet and that shouldn't be your expectation or whatever. But I also know that I watch all of his interviews and I I saw the Canaccord interview where I forgot the analyst's name, but this was a guy who had basically doubted Iron's ability to scale Childress's. It was originally, I think, 600 megawatts and then grew to 750 megawatts. But Dan, you know, felt the need to remind Joe in this interview what they accomplished. So, I like a CEO with a little edge personally who has a chip on his shoulder or something to prove. It just means that everyone's aligned. So I personally think like everyone inside of the offices in Sydney or on the sites in Texas, yeah, they're focusing on what they gotta do day-to-day and working hard, but they're human too. And I know they've heard the negative **** the past few months and I just think they're human enough for that to motivate them just a little bit. I hope, though, for that reason that with guidance specifically, like I highlighted the new 50,000 GPU batch that they announced in March where they essentially were saying that they were going to charge $3 an hour for these newest GPUs when. You can look at God particles chart every month and B200 pricing and H100 pricing is going out of the roof. So what do you think then newer generation B300 is doing? Like it's fair to say that that's going up as well. There's enough market evidence. So I just hope they're a little more aggressive with their guidance. And I personally, Franza talked about it earlier, like I would like to know at a minimum, what is the plan for Childress? Like does Horizon 5 and 6 exist? If it does, like how much more are they getting paid? Because we've shown that retrofitting air-cooled data centers and putting in B300s can be really profitable. So if they're going to demolish a building that they just built a few years ago for Bitcoin mining that they could retrofit, for three or about a third of the cost and still make good money, like there's better be a good reason why. And I hope they provide that level of detail. But Marcos, besides the, you had talked about the two phase cooling and the Vera Rubin, like what are, do you have any other high priority items as a shareholder that you want to address that I didn't cover on my list.

Speaker 3: No, I think your list was actually great. I think just the Vera Rubin and more clearance on what they want to do with the sites is the most important thing. And as I pointed out, I would like to see some more color on the financing hire. and what he's going to contribute to the team, what the exact reason was, why they hired him. Also, the guy you said that was an innovation. Mostly I would like to hear some color on what they're planning essentially for the next two years in terms of innovation and in terms of financing. And I think what we saw with Nabi yesterday that they got a high prepayment, it could also be Yeah, be the same for iron this time I think because it's time to computers now so valuable. The build outs being being slowed down. Yeah, for different reasons as you know, but the demand is so high. So yeah, I could see that happen for iron too on a specific condition. So I would mostly want to hear a lot about A little bit on site updates, but I would like to hear a lot more about their strategy for the upcoming year and next year.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Frans, what do you have?

Frans Bakker: Yeah, where I agree with Marcos that I would like to see it, I am not expecting them to talk about their new team members. I think that the people that are scheduled to be on this call are going to talk financing and commercial and then a bit of guidance and a bit of looking back. I think we're going to get the typical setup for their earnings call. I do think that the presentation will be better than what we've seen in the past. We know that they've acquired a media company back in Australia that was acquired through equity. So those those folks joined Iron, which with only being paid shares, shares in Iron. So I think that's, you know, that that says something about the, you know, the insight insights they've been exposed to. But what I'm trying to say is I think that up in terms of their new hires and the strategy, it will most likely be more a thing for like these interviews that Kent does or for McNally's kind of style interviews where they talk about, you know, what kind of new technology they're going to utilize or how they're going to develop their roadmap. Typically, the earnings calls and presentations are more like uh cut to the to the chase you know and uh it will be up to the analyst uh questions to uh you know discover a little bit more details and the last time uh on the earnings calls call I think the analyst questions were really good so I hope they can keep this level up and uh yeah so I am very much looking forward to the financing side of things as well And especially after what we've seen with the 40% prepayment for Nibius with regards to their Microsoft contract, I think it is, you know, it's going to be very interesting to see, you know, to what degree this can be, you know, reproduced by the likes of Iron and others. I think to a certain degree, what we don't know is how much of these prepayment options were known by other players. Because if you remember correctly, Mike Alfred has alluded a few times to the fact that he knows what's in those contracts because Iren talks to those hyperscalers as well. If you remember, he said something along those lines, which basically implies that deals without disclosed economics don't always mean the economics are good. And I think that's You know, let me just say like this, I think Iron knows about the 40% prepayment possibility. I think this is tied to pricing power for time to compute. I think Nibius just put a double amount of compute on the table, said we will deliver this many GPU, our instances by the end of next year. And Iron couldn't do that or, you know, chose not to do that. I don't know which one it was, but obviously, if you are able to deliver so much more capacity in the same time frame, then you have pricing power and you have prepayments exceeding regular prepayment amounts. So I think it is not so much a negotiation tactic from the KGB, as some people alluded to. I think it is just If you can demonstrate and you can guarantee and agree to deliver a lot of capacity in a relatively short period of time, you have strong negotiation leverage. And I think that this will work for Iron as well going forward. If they are able to standardize their design for liquid cool data centers, be it one or two phased, and they can assemble a team and they can build out capacity on multiple locations at once, for, let's say, Vera Rubin going into 2027, then now all of a sudden Iron is sitting at the same 40% prepayment table when they're negotiating because now they can say, look, We got you a small 200 megawatt IT load deal, but now let's talk about delivering you 500 megawatt by the end of 2027. And, you know, that will be eligible for a higher prepayment amount. I think those are the kind of topics you should think about. So there was someone in my subscriber group that made a very stupid comment saying that, Now Iron is finding out that Nebius is getting 40% prepayment. They will most likely walk away from negotiations with Microsoft because they want 40% as well. I think that is an incredibly stupid take because I think 40% prepayment given to Nebius in September was always on the table for every counterparty that Microsoft talked to. It just depends what you can offer and what you can deliver in what timeframe. I mean, let's not beat around the bush here. Iron had a pretty poor offer to Microsoft in the first place because Iron built a Vera Rubin data center and Microsoft wanted GB300s, you know? So you're basically coming up with a handicapped data center saying, okay, okay, Microsoft, I can do GB300s as well, but only 76,000, sorry, you know? So so are you really in a position of strength to get 40% prepayment if you have a design that is basically severely underutilizing your IT load in the footprint? I think, you know, the Microsoft deal between Iron and Microsoft is and, you know, it's a pretty bad way to you know, deploy your capital if it would ultimately be for GB300s only. So that's why my hope is that they will go with the substitution clause to fix the 50% of this contract to become proportionally the token output per megawatt that the buildings are designed for. Because, you know, maybe that may or may not be relevant for the prepayments within this contract, but it will certainly show that you know, Iron has taken on a deal which just gave them a foot in the door and a partnership and a way to prove themselves. So I think it is not so much that Iron got screwed by Microsoft. I think Iron got a handicapped data center project through the door with Microsoft. I mean, seriously, you're having a fixed amount of racks in a data center because you're counting on Vera Rubens. And then Microsoft comes in and says, yeah, we'll most likely be short a few hundred megawatt next year. We want you to optimize it for GB300s. And then somehow, you know, Iron gets this deal, but they are running like Instead of a 200 kilowatt, they're running 140 kilowatt in those same data centers. So I would just like to emphasize that going forward, I think Iron's got a much better position at the negotiation table just from the fact alone that they will have Horizon One delivered and they will not have this data center problem anymore where they have made a design ahead of schedule and they will produce a data center that is exactly in line with the expectations of the customer. Plus they will be able to scale faster because of all the, you know, the team that they have set up in Childress, the team they will set up in Sweetwater. So long story short, I think Nebius has shown what pricing power is in terms of time to compute. I think time to compute is the essential thing here. they have basically doubled the, capacity, for Microsoft relative to Iron over the period of 2026. So I think that that is deserved, that deserves the premium of 40% prepayment. So, you know, I, I, I won't say there's anything to doubt about that, but I, I just want to say I don't think that this is like a surprise backstab to Iron. I think Iron always had this, You know, I think I see these negotiations as a like a DJ turntable. You can switch a button down and then you have you can put another button up. And I think that you can push the button to 40% prepayment if you double the capacity in the same time frame. That's just basically what I'm trying to say. So I hope they will talk about this, but I think we will just see it in the next deals. If the capacity in the timeframe goes up, then the prepayment amount will inevitably also go up. That's my estimate going forward.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Marcos, you wanted to respond.

Speaker 3: Yeah, this will be also my last thing that I will contribute to the call before I go to bed. Yeah, I fully agree with France also. You have to see it as a full landscape which fits. I wrote a full post about it and it's fully in line with Francis. It's like they're looking for which partner at which time optimizes their time to compute and what they can deliver and they want to pay a little bit extra for that. So it's not backstabbing of iron or backstabbing of whoever. It's just turning up the button a little bit who is most complimentary at that time, at that specific timeline on what they need. So yeah, fully, fully in line with what Franz said. Don't have to add anything extra on it. What I want to do, what I want to add something extra on it is that if you look at new AI and the hire of Ted Warner, he got double the amount of performance based compensation, then he got normal equity. And you could see this potentially as a trend if we see more patterns from people moving into finance, into the operational world, let's say at Iron and at new AI. And if you look at, I just pulled it up, if you look at Anthony Lewis It's not fully disclosed what his performance-based fee is, but it is a lot higher in terms of he got a pretty good base packages. But if you see for Ted Warner, he also had like specific really short timelines where he could unlock those performance-based RSUs. in terms of you need to fix a finance deal in one month, et cetera, et cetera. And if you now look at the guy that Iren signed, he is he is like incentive incentivized to also build Iron up quickly and focus on access to capital markets. And if you see what Ted Warner already gets in terms of performance boost, right, in stepping over from the finance structure to the operational companies like New AI, which is a totally different stage, by the way. But it is a signal that people move from the financing companies who previously and still provide capital to the operational players. That means that they see a lot of upside in this sector to make that move. We see the new AI, we see that IREN now, and I think that's a pretty significant signal that shows how much those kind of people who build up a really high track record, good career, etc., step over to the operational companies like Iron and New AI. And I think that's a very bullish signal for the market overall to see that trend, that those kind of people move from the financing institutions to the operational players.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Great points, Marcos. I totally 100% agree. And if I make my way back to Europe, we will enjoy a steak together in Amsterdam despite the government pushback of your home country. But thanks for joining again tonight. Everyone appreciates it and get some sleep, my friend.

Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you, guys. Enjoy the space. I'm curious on the earnings. We'll see. We will hear it next week. Bye.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Thanks, Marcos. So Franz, what else? You know what I forgot, and I wish Marcos is unfortunately logging off, but I find it last earnings call in February, Dan had mentioned a multibillion-dollar deal that required a software solution that many of us had come to some sort of conclusion that it relates to Kubernetes install for ideally a client like Anthropic most notably. But do you have any thoughts, Franz, on if we'll get any more I think that's something that gets left to be desired with iron. I think they can make a lot of money with bare metal as it is, and the majority of their revenue will be bare metal. But as the company evolves, or maybe it's still too early in their journey to even worry about it, but the fact that Dan felt the need to confront it on the prior earnings call by saying they had an in-house solution and then referencing that deal, Do you think there's any possibility that they speak to that on the call?

Frans Bakker: I think it will be odd if he won't. So, you know, he basically maneuvered himself into a corner where he has to talk about it. At the very least, an analyst will probably ask him what's up with that multibillion dollar deal with software if they won't address it himself. So yeah, I guess we'll we'll have to see. But as it relates to is it their time to to do this? I think yes, because the hardest part in Iron's eyes is the infrastructure. And if they have, you know, established a cadence and a team and a procurement and supply chain where they are comfortably going to be able to build out Sweetwater in parallel with the rest of Childers. I think that it will make all the sense in the world to focus on going up in the stack, you know, in conjunction. So, I see this as a likely, you know, path forward. It will increase their reach within the non-hyperscaler business, a non-bare metal business. They will be able to serve clients that require Kubernetes or more. So it just increases their value proposition without massive CapEx, or, you know, otherwise investing in people and other companies. I do think that there is M&A possible over the medium term to long term, but I don't see that as something that's going to happen this year. But yes, it would make a lot of sense to me if they would pursue this, especially if you pair this with all the advertisement they are doing with the trams and billboards and sports teams. I don't think it's just a social license. I think they are trying to brand their name out there. So yeah, those are my thoughts for now.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: So as a follow-up to that, as you were saying that, I see Jeff Rosenberg's in the crowd, and when we talk one-on-one, a lot of times what's come up in conversation is this idea of sovereign AI, and if you don't see the power... of AI in governments look no further than the current conflict overseas. Whether you agree with it or not, it's indisputable that the use of AI by the US government has changed their strategy and how they operate in this Iranian conflict. So I personally, given the domiciles in Canada and the U.S. and most likely Australia, even though it's not been officially announced. I can't imagine if Irene aims to be a global player. I think a lot of this too will result in potentially sovereign business that will be higher margin as well as opposed to selling bare metal services to the hyperscaler. So that's something I'm definitely looking at. And back to the Kubernetes install, like everyone will say that we're trying to, I should say skeptics might try and say myself or anyone else in the community is trying to pump Iron stock and say that we're pairing up Anthropic. But the reason why it's such a great fit, I have no evidence that we're going to do business with them. I just play the probabilities and they have a huge power problem. And if Iron's able to install Kubernetes to organize their workflows and they have one fewer person focused on infrastructure, like that's a great relationship as opposed to working with competitors that are trying to make competing frontier models, like trying to look at the situation. And another person in the crowd, Nano Titan or Francisco, was speaking to how Microsoft and OpenAI had this almost breakup where Microsoft is now, has traditionally used OpenAI as the basis of Copilot But as they move forward and come out with their Microsoft AI, which Dan had actually retweeted a post from Satya Nadella, I just, it makes too much sense for Iron, whether it's open AI or. Anthropic to team with these guys that just simply have a power problem that they can plug and play and build faster than everyone. So those were just some of my thoughts related to that. And yeah, we're going to find out pretty soon what is behind the curtain. And I'm excited. And I think that a lot of the darkness the past few months, the light's going to be brought to it and we're going to see what we already know, that we have a great company with a bright future that is in an emerging space. But what I would say to echo my thoughts earlier and more aggressive guidance is if all of the indications by the hyperscalers are that this there's this power constraint and all of these indications that AI is red hot to someone who's not well versed on iron, like Franz or I or other members of this community. I think it's a fair question. I think there's good reasons why they haven't signed stuff up to date, and I think they're going to have improved economics. But for us to be critical and say to someone on the outside, us not having a deal like it's a reasonable first question. And I think the company's about to meet that and likely have something signed this week. But anyone on the outside, like if you did a Google search on Iron, it's going to say Bitcoin miner. So I do think that this is the call. In parallel, last quarter, Cypher tried to rebrand as Cypher Digital or Bitfarms had rebranded Akil. Even though Iron always had a vision of AI, they still in the marketplace have this Bitcoin label to it, whether that's fair or not, which impacts the premium they trade at. And I think the only way to solve that is to keep growing their AI revenue, but also just some of these more of these partnerships and re-instilling in people's minds that they are focused on AI going forward despite having Bitcoin roots. So Franz, what other Anything else on my list that I neglected to include that you wanted to talk about with respect to earnings?

Frans Bakker: I think we're going to hear about delivery to Microsoft for a part of a first trench or a first trench. By the end of last week, or I should say around Thursday or Friday, I believe, roughly 75% of Horizon 1 was energized, but that is only saying there is electricity at the rack level. But that's a feat on itself. But we've seen one data center with GPUs in a picture from Dan. I am not entirely sure if all the three data centers are full with GPUs by now, but I would assume so because it would make very little sense to me if they would have a partial delivery for one horizon. So let's just hope that they talk about a successful delivery of a certain megawatt total or GPU total to Microsoft, that will partially or, you know, mostly de-risk the execution of the Horizon project, in my opinion. I think there will be a very relieving factor, especially if they can get Microsoft to comment in their earnings report, you know, like we saw when they signed the deal and the partnership. So I am looking forward to that, obviously, a conclusion on the substitution clause. And if there is a deal between Iron and Microsoft for Horizon 5 and 6, then I assume that they will also include this. So these are like all Microsoft related and all Childress related. So I think the main focus will be on Childress for these earnings paired with obviously the ARR coming from Prince George. I am not entirely sure if I subscribe to the RPO, translating directly to forecasted revenue for the quarter. I have applied a, you know, a non-conservative, well, like an out-of-the-box metric to come up to 65 to 75, well, 60 to $75 million in AI revenue, whereas the God particle has a Bloomberg terminal and has came to the conclusion it's more than $80 million. So, you know, there can be two ways to approach this or there can be various ways to approach this, but I think they're going to come up short. So, yeah, that's not very bullish. And I think the headline number will also disappoint. There was someone in the comments to your post that said that the CAP calls may be able to pull them out into positive EPS because it would offset the losses on the on the on the convertible notes. But yeah, you know, I don't know if it's going to do it. I've always said to the people that follow me, particularly, particularly my subscribers, that I am a little bit worried about this will be their last week earnings, so to say, in terms of, you know, headline numbers and results. But The just, you know, if we get a bad reaction from algos in the first 30 to 60 minutes and then the call will be very bullish, I think that will turn around pretty quickly. So I guess it just depends. I think what we're talking about now can all be made undone by a deal announcement before earnings. So I am not going to say, I'm not going to tell you to wake up early on Monday. because, you know, it may not happen, but I think the odds are there. There are a lot of circumstantial things that are stacking up in favor of a deal announcement at or before earnings, and I'm still leaning towards, you know, before earnings. A couple of these things include like the CEO traveling multiple times to the United States and, you know, tweeting from Childress and, you know, he's he's not there for for just to watch the GPUs or watch the substation being energized. So, yeah, I think he's there to finalize things ahead of earnings and You know, I think he is also conscious of the fact that he has talked about a multi-billion dollar deal with software the last earning, so he will probably do his best to sign something that looks like that, I guess. I mean, this is the time to sign. He's now in the optimal deal sign window, in my opinion. You have a proven execution of your most difficult task ever, the horizon project, the first building or the first tranche will be done. So you can show that to the market. At the same time, having a new deal will, you know, command certain, you know, I guess, premium to a certain degree that you have shown that you've done it before. So sort of. And at the same time, you know, we've been hearing commercial negotiations, final, you know, we're in the final stages of, or we're having, you know, we've heard this too many times. Now it's time to come up with something. I think if it will be an empty-handed earnings with relatively poor headline numbers, then only an exceptional earnings call with guidance can save us. But from what I heard from Sydney, these earnings have been in the making for over two weeks. So that's why I knew about the earnings dates for a long time, because apparently, they're doing something. They're going to pull some kind of rabbit out of the head. And this is not investment advice or financial advice. But it's supposedly a very big happening, and I don't know what that is. It can be a deal or it can just be, you know, something special for their earnings. But I don't think this is going to be a non-event. If the actual quarter is poor, they are going to, you know, do their best to, I don't know, deliver something else. That's what I am looking forward to. And zooming into individual sites, you know, I think it's just going to be a demonstration of we delivered Prince George, we delivered Horizon One, we delivered Sweetwater Energization, you know, look how good we are at executing. And now we're going to go to the next phase and we're going to do it X times as fast. Then there will be an analyst question that's saying, oh, we see the NIBI's got 40% prepayment. And then Dan can say, yeah, look, I just told you we're going to go three times as fast. If you think we're not having these negotiations about 40% prepayments, I think that's a very, very dangerous thing, you know, to think. So he's going to probably grab this opportunity to demonstrate that they are also having these conversations. Because obviously this is in the toolbox of Microsoft. I mean, it was always there because it was there in September last year for NIBIUS. It doesn't mean it was never on the table for Iron. So I think Iron is going to scale and they're going to demonstrate that building really fast is their actual skill set. And, you know, by time to compute, that will be their pricing power and their negotiation leverage. So I think 2026 will be the year where we see a little bit more proud chest pounding than Roberts in earnings calls, in my opinion. And I think that the coming one will be the first one. And I don't think he will do that with empty hands. So I think it's going to be a very bullish earnings uh presentation earnings call it's going to be a very bullish week um if they somehow fail on all these uh counts then I have been so wrong then uh you know I I just I I think that would would be you know I I I can't see that happening but you know at the same time you know I've been wrong many times before so um you know, just take it with a grain of salt. I am very bullish going into this week, and so that's what I am right now as well. It's already Monday morning here, so you can open the market for me. You know, I'm ready, but obviously for Iron to announce a deal, it will be a bit longer. But yeah, so I'm bullish. I'll pause there.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Let's go to Super Sane and then I might have a few follow-ups for you, Franz. Super Sane, good evening.

Super Sane: Good evening, Butcher and Franz, and thank you again for doing this. I just want to shout out Franz here in his channel. I feel like he has been doing a very great job, along with the others in the community, about keeping up with the Sweetwater One energization. And I remember 2 weeks ago, we were on the same call and we were wondering what next to hear. And I think France was very straight with saying that he expects an earnings, which I agreed on. And last week, before this energization news, me and France on the same call, we were saying what to expect. And I remember answering France that I don't see any changes in iron. I'm bullish and I think they will deliver. And I mean, analyzing what Franz posted and other also in the community, you can kind of see where Iron is headed to. It's not like rocket science. It's just you have to gather information to connect the dots and see where it's going. And that being said, it was wonderful to see the energization news that came on Friday aftermarket. And I feel like it's a big relief for sure for the community. Because again, that just proves Iron delivered what they said. And I also want to point out a lot of people said that, oh, why Friday after market? And I tend to believe that I think Iron finished construction earlier and that they were just waiting on ERCOT to finalize. I feel like from their part, They were fully done. So I feel like the maybe a little bit of that delay was caused by not them, the other party. And also just I do have a question for France, but I just want to give a few cents of my view here. From last year till now, the last time that Iran announced the deal for Microsoft, it was around November the 3rd, I believe. Yeah, November the 3rd. And even before that deal came, we were actually in the call and we were trying to connect the dot and see if they were going to announce something. And funny thing is that they did. And it's not like we were having a guess. I feel like it was a, when you have data to connect to, you can make an educated guess. So I feel like this time, based on what friends and others in the community are feeling, we can kind of come to an educated guess that Iron is in a very good position market-wise to announce something. And it would, in the business economy of things, it would make sense for them. Because also this week, Core Reave, there's earnings of Core Reaves, I believe Cypher. So we're going to see about multiple perspectives and angles of how the competitors are doing and what they're lacking or what they're doing better. And in terms of just the field in itself, like how can you just ignore iron, right? You look at what Microsoft is saying, they've been saying, hey, we have the GPUs, but we don't have the power to plug them in. Iron comes into mind. Anthropic situation, you think about their constraints and you think, oh, Iron can solve this. You think about open AI, oh, Iron has 1.4 gigawatt ready and more coming in the way. So over and over again, I feel like, sure, a lot of people can have hopium. I try not to. I try going with what do they have. And to be honest, I feel very confident on Iron having a physical infrastructure because If you are going to look at the software game, like, yes, you can make a big, like, you can be very successful, but I feel like the competition in the software world is very, very tough. So. So since Iron is not there yet, I'm actually more confident because I feel like if Iron is playing out this infrastructure monopoly control, I like this business better because it's just physical, right? Compute will always, I mean, sorry, power will always have. value over software. Like you see Anthropic coming up with updates every other week and there's just software companies tanking, right? So that being said, where AI is moving, you have to see AI is moving very fast. And for it to move even faster and deliver, they need power. Of course, they need GPUs as well, but they need power. That's the first part. And if you just crack the first layer, for me, at least from my perspective, I just see as Aaron sitting there with the solution book and everybody's just eyeing it. So I wouldn't be surprised at all if Aaron was to come up with the with the sort of any deal this week before earnings, because like Franz mentioned, that it would just be the perfect scenario for them, for their business model. So that's just my two cents. I feel like people that have been bullish about Iron, even in the ups and downs, I feel like they always had confidence in Iron's core business, which is that they have the great connected power, they can deliver fast, and they have had this vision. Before anybody knew about AI, which is 2018, like nowhere, no one was talking about AI, nobody knew nothing about compute, and all of a sudden we just see so many experts on X talking about compute, which is nice, but I feel like Dan Roberts had vision long time ago and. he knew what was coming based on the people he circles around with. And I feel like it's finally his iron's time and also his time to deliver and actually like I'm more bullish than ever. So yeah, it's great, exciting week. We'll see what happens. And that's just my two cents. And one question I have for France is, Friends, before the news came out on Friday in the morning, right, morning or Friday, did you, like, what was going in your head? Because I know you are very on point with where the construction is going and you probably made a very educated guess. So when the news didn't come out till Friday, were you expecting something will come out and why or why not?

Frans Bakker: Yeah, so I actually wrote IR the day before with that, you know, I poked, poked them to say that you had got to educate the market because the market and the people on X in particular are absolutely ******** and they don't know about an outage queue. They don't know about external dependency on getting approval to energize. Those are day-to-day events. And if I run energized on Friday, it means they're substation was ready on Thursday. And Thursday is the last day of April. So Iron did everything on their end accordingly. But unfortunately, with a connection to a grid, which is a, you know, like a living and breathing organism through throughout the whole Orkot area, you are depending on an external group of people to say, okay, now you can flip the switch because you have your position in the outage queue. And I just feel like that would have been such a futile thing to just tell the market contingent on our position in the queue and the grid conditions, we will be able to energize in April because within our scope, of construction, we will be done with everything on our end and the utilities end by the end of April. I mean, there is a way to inform the market just a little bit more. You know, it's just a little bit of education. That's what I do on this platform, right? So I just feel that is kind of a miss on the IR part. You know, I won't say it is inherently IR being you know, providing too little details to the market. I think it is a more of a company culture thing where they just assume that people will figure it out. And there. So there are some people in the crowd today that absolutely hate this about iron and have literally sold their shares because they want to be spoon fed much more. And yeah, well, you know, that's just a I guess the way the life of an iron investor, you know, if you're not in these channels with us, the people that are in this call and in the crowd, then you're pretty much in the dark for most of the quarter. And even if you're in the channels, sometimes you know about things way before the company announces them, or sometimes they won't even announce it, even though we know it. So From what we saw on the satellite imagery, you know, we knew about the point of interconnection. We know which exact pole they were going to tie the wires to, and then you order a $800 satellite image that shows the exact lines being connected. You can make a very educated guess that everything is done on their end because, you know, how would you? be, why would you be tying your lines to the utility if you wouldn't be ready to flip the switch? I mean, that's basically the last thing you do before you do that. So I think I did expect it and I'm glad that they did it when they did it. I mean, if you remember when Iron said we're going to get 50 exahash by the end of June last year, they literally announced it in after hours or something, you remember, on the last day of June. Because Iran is under extreme legal scrutiny and they have KPMG as their auditor and, you know, they don't want to mess up on this. They are overly compliant. Their headquarters is in nanny state, Australia. I mean, you're not going to announce energization unless you energize. So if it happened in the afternoon of Friday, they are going to announce it in the after hours on Friday, right? I mean, or the end of after hours or whatever it was, I think it would be not iron like to wait until Monday just to pump their share price if that would do anything, you know, they just reported when it happens and I think that's what happened. So, you know, also it gives a kind of like the idea that they were only one day late, right? If you look at it technically in terms of the energization event. So if you wait until Monday, you get a whole weekend of people saying, Haha, Iron didn't energize in April and it's already made it fourth on Monday, you know? So, you know, I think it was better this way and it's more Iron-like to do it this way, you know, just report it when it happens and not time it. So yeah.

Super Sane: No, thanks, Franz. That was a great answer. And like you mentioned, I do agree that like a lot of people were overanalyzing, thinking that they announced it after market to manipulate the share or like, you know, it's building up to something. But I kind of was thinking the same because if you look at pattern, Iron really doesn't. I know sometimes we do want them to care when they release at what certain times, but like you mentioned, if you look at their pattern, it's just they announce and I think they're very transparent and announce it when things are done instead of like, marketing that part as well. So I see it as a good thing. which is great. And another thing I wanted to touch base on for the people here listening to is that Dan Roberts and the people in the company, Dan Roberts himself is very highly educated. I believe he has a master's in finance as well. So, and I say this again, I'm not saying like people that went to school are just geniuses. I'm just saying that, you know, once you're in the field of things and somebody has a background, and you're dealing with Wall Street, you're dealing with people in the sector, you somehow need some basic knowledge versus you like, think about it this way, right? Let's say he didn't have a master's in finance and he hired someone that has my master's in finance that would advise him on things versus imagine he's the boss right? And he wants the best for the company. And guess what? This guy has the knowledge to make that decision and have that analytical skill. And I feel like there's very few, like if you look at the competitors, they're very few when it comes to having this kind of asset in the company. So I feel like that's one angle, which is also great for Iron, is that they had the vision, the knowledge, and the expertise. way earlier in the game. We're talking 2017, 2018. And as far as the share price, I really don't care. I remember Aaron going to 15, dropping back down almost like 50, 60%. And like the share price meant nothing. I always focused on the core business model. And as long as that's being executed, I think Aaron is doing everything right.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Let's go to NASDAQ. Thanks for waiting, NASDAQ.

NASDAQ: Hi, I will get straight to the point.

Speaker 3: I was thinking the surprise that we may get out of the earnings could be Australia. I mean, they've been hiring so much over there, but haven't revealed anything so far. So that could be one of the catalysts.

NASDAQ: I don't know what you guys think, but I'm very hopeful of hearing something from Australia.

Speaker 6: That's all I got.

Super Sane: Yeah, pretty much.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Yeah, I so there's been millions of dollars of marketing spend related to the Sydney Swan sponsorship and then the IRIN, you know, next big thing in AI. Those are on the public transit there. And this kind of speaks to this isn't necessarily specific to Australia. But from our relationship with some of the early seed investors of Iron, Dan and Will are historically pretty frugal and shareholder conscious of how they're spending their dollars. So for all of this marketing spend to be dished out and for sponsorship and whatnot, I do think it's leading to something, I guess, where And Franz can speak to this angle a little more. I think the only way we get something related to Australia sooner is if there's some sort of some sort of joint venture that he can speak to a little better than I can, because but at the same time, I just they've never announced a site. So they would be announcing a new site and a deal simultaneously. And I, I just, I have a lot of faith in Franz to find anything and everything that Iron's doing around the world. And while there's little clues and secret floors and the HQ in Sydney, like it just feels like it's something will happen, but it's still cooking right now. So do you have anything to add to that, Franz?

Frans Bakker: Well, I think, first of all, it's amazing to have the official NASDAQ with us in the space. So thanks for joining. And sorry, I didn't want to laugh. This is ********. I'm laughing at my own joke. So what I think is happening in Australia is Iron is attempting to get in on a bid with a government problem, so to say. I think what they're offering in South Australia is a solution for a problem with where the South Australian grid has a overcapacity at a certain amount of substations. And I think that Iron has their eyes on two of them, and one in particular, where there is a roughly a gigawatt available. And I think that that's how I'm approaching this due diligence and research is I'm just trying to figure out in what way they're going to be involved in a project to relieve the grid there because that's what my focus is on. I think Iron is only going to operate in Australia if they have the full cooperation or even the request of of a local or as should I say, state government. So I think we're going to hear something around that. And my main focus is South Australia. My second focus is New South Wales. I think the creation of the entity there, the subsidiary is a signal and We heard a bunch of other rumors from golf tournaments and whatever. So yes, we will most likely hear something from Australia. And yeah, I'll pause there.

NASDAQ: Yeah, thanks.

Speaker 6: Thanks, Franz.

Speaker 3: And I mean, they have been announcing all these hirings. And with all that information coming out, I would be surprised if they don't announce anything about Australia. I think it's time they mentioned something about Australia. And when I researched or Googled for data centers in Australia, I think there is.

NASDAQ: Quite a bit of activity out there. Some really big projects coming up.

Speaker 3: And some of those don't have names as to who's running those or who is operating those. things like that. So I'm thinking probably, you know, Iron is looking into one of those. They're just my my thought process at this point.

Frans Bakker: Great. I honestly don't know how Iron's gonna run a data center project there. They don't have a construction team of their own, so they're most likely going to partner with someone. I do see it likely for their first sort of joint venture to be in Australia. There are a bunch of rumors of names going around of who they're going to partner with. There are a lot of these projects near Sydney as well, where Microsoft is involved, Air Trunk is involved, and they're all trying to like use these different entity names to sort of keep it obscure who is behind the projects. And I think Iron is going to operate in a similar way. So this may be that we won't hear from Australia this earnings yet, and they're going to do a bit more of front running of the project and then announce it in the next earnings. It also is occurs to me that IREN tries to do time a little bit their earnings information. So I think if they have enough for this earnings. Without Australia, they may not talk about Australia if it's not absolutely required. So I guess it will depend how good the rest of their presentation is and their topics. And if it happens to be that way, then I really hope analysts will ask a question about Australia. So yeah, I guess it's my dark horse for the earnings.

Speaker 3: Yep, cool.

Super Sane: Thanks.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Before I go to Cy, I included in the best post from X Capital with the hiring increases and the scaling most related to, most notably Sweetwater and how that's intensified in the last month or two. But I think where I'm coming from, all this money that's being spent, Everyone can see job postings and us talk about it. So naturally, it would be understandable for a good analyst to ask the question, you're doing all this hiring and these increases to your personnel costs. you know, where's the deal to support it? So most likely there is supporting revenue so that it doesn't look like they're becoming irresponsible and growing their headcount faster than their revenue. But it just feels like we're in this potential big bang moment where you have all this hiring, you might have deal announcements. And one thing I would push back on, Franz, I don't want them to hold anything back anymore. I mean, if there's a strategic reason for them to not disclose Australia, I guess that's one thing. But we have competitors that trade at vastly higher market caps than us, and they're talking about business in 2027 and 2028. As long as we're a publicly held company that chooses to use equity through an ATM or a convertible note, I just, I think it's a lost opportunity to not tell everyone what's going on within reason so that the equity, you know, the share price is higher and they sell fewer shares to fund their business, which by the way, will help accelerate it because they can sell more shares if they need so to scale that business even faster. So I hear you that they might hold it back for the next quarter to have it in their pocket, but we've just seen proof of the last six months of what happens when you're not saying enough in the marketplace and short interest is up and we're trading sub 50 even though we signed a hyperscaler and they might not look at it day-to-day, but I know that they need a higher share price to fund these ambitions. Otherwise, you know, to use this in the 30s or 40s, which I'm not suggesting is going to happen. I'm confident with what we've discussed here tonight that they're going to deliver and potentially test new all time highs in the next few months here. But that would be my pushback on that. But we have Sai up. So Sai, how are you? Usually you got good questions. What do you got tonight?

Speaker 6: Hey, can you hear me now? Yep. Hello. All right, thanks. Thanks, Les. Thank you for this information. Yeah, I think I tend to agree with the response. the government project with Australia. I think giving in to the community, whatnot, and Australia is the thing that it's their backyard. So I think that's a possible thing. Yeah, that's that. And another thing, the whole situation for me, it presents, it's like a little bit deja vo for me in the sense that I don't know if you guys remember this back in, I think back last year, I think, you know, Dan was talking about a trillion dollar hyperscaler and he didn't talk much about a couple of earnings, I believe, and then came back with Microsoft deal and then the reiterating had started. So I think I feel like we are in such a kind of a situation where I think he wants to, you know, deal with the Microsoft project and show to the entire world that, you know, hey, this is something we can do. And then that'll put them in a position of strength when they talk to deals about the Sweetwater site. So yeah, I think it's, I think this is all, I remember the situation where left and right, every, every Bitcoin miner was announcing Colollocations and Michael Alfred was the only one who was saying that, you know, if we don't do the deal, that's better. And everyone was pounding on the table about, you know, how good Core Scientific was and all that. So I think it's a repeat of that, but maybe it's my wishful thinking, but we'll see. But I got a question to France. So if for the substitution class, if for the Microsoft, if they're going to go to Vera Rubins, do you think we'll face a supply issue? Because at that point in time, Hottest check in the market. So, you know, do you think, do we run into supply issues or it's going to run smelt?

Frans Bakker: I think Iron has this pre-calculated and, you know, the CTO of Iron is on a first name basis with Jensen. So I think that he probably knows a thing or two about the availability of the chips. I think, you know, it will be within the agreement with Microsoft, the timeline. And I think if Iron has demonstrated that their data center is actually VR200 compatible despite running GB300s, then they have a sort of leverage towards NVIDIA, right, for getting the VR200s. But in my opinion, it's just, I don't really know how these OEM deliveries work because Iron is directly a preferred partner of Nvidia, but they acquire all their chips through OEM. So how does that work with your status as a preferred partner? How does it work with your priority in the queue? I mean, if let's say Iron will buy VR200s from Lenovo and Lenovo is just pooling together all these guide. that are interested in, you know, acquiring Vera Rubens and then they will place a big order at Nvidia and Iron will just get a chunk of that. I mean, I don't know if it is up to Iron, you know, to prove to Nvidia directly that they are good for them or be able to run them. So I will just say that I think that we will never uncover the real truth behind the procurement of these chips. I think what we just need to assume is that within the commercial interest, Iron will most likely don't want to have empty data centers for too long. So I think we are now entering into the area of the period of time where the availability of GB300s now and the future availability of VR200s, this gap is going to shrink and just by the passing of time. And I think that this will be part of the, you know, negotiation, the commercial negotiations that Iron's having with Microsoft and others. So I think B300s in Childers is a placeholder. I don't I'm not in the camp like Agrippa, for example. He thinks Iron has a generational opportunity to convert everything to B300s. I don't think that this is what Iron's planning to do. I think they are using it a little bit as a BATNA and a little bit to pass the time to get to the sweet spot where they will be able to strike on Phil Ruben. So, I think the coming two quarters will be extremely telling. And I think the main team will be Vera Rubin going forward. And I think that was going to start potentially this week. I think we're going to hear a lot more of Vera Rubin being mentioned in the earnings call, in the presentation. And I think going forward, it's going to take the place of the hype that we got around air cooled data centers previously. So those are just my thoughts on on this.

Speaker 6: Okay, thanks. Also, I want to make a prediction here in the sense I think we have seen Australia. I think soon they will be in India. I think it will be in medium term to somewhere down the lane. There is there is an India plan for them is what I'm thinking also.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: All right, thanks for joining Side. Super Saiyan, what do you got? And probably move to closing thoughts after that.

Super Sane: Yeah, I've got a question for France, but before that, I just got a notification for people who follow Bitcoin. Bitcoin just reclaimed the $80,000 price point, which is great. And yeah, and along with that, I have a question for France. So France, we know that Iron has a $6 billion dilution optional thing that they have. And I know also Corweave is not taking that route, but instead They are so much in debt that they're paying almost 2 billion in interest per month, if I'm not mistaken. So I stress tested both and I did find the IRIN method to be more effective. And my question for you is logically thinking having that option is something looking at IRIN's business model is something they would want to have in the future. My thing is, do you think they made it now to show hyperscalers or parties that they're dealing with the, hey, look, if you want to make a deal with us, just know that we have coverage as well. We don't have to run around trying to get debt with high interest. We kind of managed it ourself and we're in a good position to negotiate with you. Do you think it was from that perspective?

Frans Bakker: I think it's one of the perspectives. You know, ultimately, I think it is a switch in a board where they can up their depth relative to their equity. I think they're going to deploy equity as that comes by. So if they acquire GPUs that they will finance, you know, after they arrive, for example, that I think that they will have issued or will issue equity. You know, obviously it's not going to be reactive like that because that would mean they would just tap the ATM only to satisfy this debt to equity ratio. But I think this is ultimately one of the main reasons is this ratio. And the second one is just the availability of cash when they really need it, because they're going wide, like they're going absolutely incredibly wide. The amount of sites that they have monetized, that they have exercised on, and are now owned by iron is just gone through the roof. I mean, under the air code batching system, going forward, there will be very, a much more severe, demonstrating site control requirement. You need to have a five-year fixed lease or a deed. And IREN doesn't do leases, so they are buying all their land now. And that's giving us researchers a lot of, you know, interesting things because we can see, oh, wow, they have a data center site plan in this county too. And, oh, they finally went ahead and exercised this option that we heard about that they had. So in my, scoreboard, Iron has already got like, Sweetwater one to, to basically one to seven or one to eight already in the, in the, you know, the backlog sort of for, for the development pipeline, going into 2035, they will have, an abundance of power going forward. So that's why I talked about 12, 10 to 12 gigawatts before. I think there's just, you know, no doubt that they have had this. So, you know, if you really zoom in on this batching process, you're going to see that this is going to favor Iron so incredibly well. I mean, they are going to wipe the floor with the other speculative parties and even companies like Google that just didn't get there in time and didn't have their **** in order. Those are, they are not going to be, you know, having this luxury of having multiple gigawatts across multiple sites coming online towards the end of this decade. So I'm kind of moving away from the original question, but so I lost my train of thoughts. Can you just quickly repeat your question and I'll try to answer it quickly?

Super Sane: Yeah, sure. No, great analysis, by the way. But basically the question was, do you think that the leverage, they didn't go take private debt and they may, they rather took the $6 billion dilution leverage. Was that for a reason to show hyperscalers that they're in a good position to negotiate and that they don't have to run around looking for private debts?

Frans Bakker: Yes, but I do think that it is not just in a in a way of, look, we are capital healthy. We are we have enough cash to survive. I think that this $6 billion ATM in terms of, you know, capital or cash for CapEx is a demonstration of building speed. So I think you have to judge Iron going forward by their construction cadence, their, you know, standing up clusters, standing up data centers, because obviously very, we have a very strong precedent now with the NIBI's 40% down payment. just ignoring the economics on that deal for a moment and ignoring all economics. If you can promise a solution to a hyperscaler such as Microsoft, where you are fixing their problem for them, that warrants a premium. And Microsoft is one example of a company that is willing to pay for that and massively. So It comes down to time to compute. If you are a data center operator, an AI cloud company with your own construction team, and you are very confident that you can deliver 500 megawatts of IT load in the coming 18 months, and you can bring this to the table, that's actually, that's negotiation leverage. You know, that will give you pricing power, and I think a $6 billion ATM is just a way to establish the fact that you can actually build it because you have the money for that. So it's not on itself a leverage in a hyperscalar negotiation. I think it's a way to prove that you can fund your build out in the time period that you are claiming or agreeing on that you can do. So I think that's it. I think it's about time to compute in terms of standing up data centers capacity in a certain amount of time, which will then in exchange give you a higher amount of prepayments as one of the examples of what you can get from a hyperscaler.

Super Sane: Great. That's a great answer, friends. And Butcher, by the way, I see Mike Alfred on the chat. I mean, we would love to hear from Mike Alfred. It's always a pleasure. So if Mike Alfred would want to say a few words, the chat, let's hear from Mike Alfred.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Mike, welcome this evening. I saw a Bitcoin crossover. 80K and you were letting a few people know about it. But how are you?

NASDAQ: I'm good. 80K was always inevitable. There's it's just a matter of time, right? 80K, 90K, 100K, 150K, 300K, 500K. I mean, it's just it's so dumb. But if you create an asset that cannot be turned off, it cannot be stopped, cannot be censored. cannot be destroyed and it emits less supply than the reference currency, you know, the unit of account that is sort of the center of the universe, right, for pricing, then over time, the thing that emits less supply will go up in terms of the unit of account. So simply Bitcoin will go up in dollar terms over long, long periods of time. That doesn't mean mining Bitcoin necessarily would be good, but at every point along that curve. But holding Bitcoin is a very frictionless way to participate in that relative purchasing power increase. So I think that just continues, right? And I think Bitcoin's become like a liquidity barometer for the whole market. It's sort of like one of the most powerful macro prediction mechanisms as well. So it predicts a lot of stuff that is not that obvious to most market participants. I think it has a more a sort of astute understanding of a number of different factors via the fact that it's traded in so many places and so many venues by so many different people and without specific government manipulation of that asset. It's very hard to do specific manipulation if you can't maintain the trading in one jurisdiction with one exchange or one group of exchanges that you regulate. If you can't create tax policy, for example, that drives the behavior of that asset globally, it's hard to control it. Like for example, the US government can control, largely control like flows in and out of US equities via a number of different mechanisms. So anyway, long way of saying that like everything's going to get better, right? I've been saying this for a while. This is a little more what we've experienced the last six months is just a mid-cycle macro correction with no similarity whatsoever to previous periods like 2022 that were actually quite more acute. We had a major macro drawdown in the spring of last year. I was reminding people that IRN was $5 as recently as April of last year. And so one of the things that makes me chuckle, right, as a sort of long-term observer of the sector and as someone who's deeply involved in the space, is that even the smartest people, even the most adept, right, deeply focused researchers and analysts, like miss the simplest things. If you're telling me that Iron was really worth $5 last April, then I have a bridge to sell you, right? Because it wasn't really worth $5 because they essentially had the same site profile, nearly the same immediate term site profile that it has now. Not really that much has changed. The only thing that changed was people's perception of that. And so this argument that I've been hearing for three or four years that if Iron just did X, Y, or Z thing, the market would just understand it better and the price would be why versus where it is now is just wrong. It's been wrong for three years. Iron wasn't worth $2.75 in November of 2023 and then worth $9 in December of 2023. It wasn't worth $15 in December of '24 and then $5 in April of '25. That's not really a change in the fundamental nature of iron or the nature of the future cash flows, that's a change in external perception. It's very similar to what happens in Bitcoin. Bitcoin goes up and down a lot, but a lot of what you're experiencing is just the volatility emanating from external forces. So because Bitcoin's priced in dollar, and there are a lot of people who hold dollars that have different purposes than Bitcoin holders or aren't so long-term oriented or doing different things. When they get freaked out or when there's technical reasons, like you're a commodity trading advisor or you're a quant fund, and you're sniffing out certain signals, and when your signals say sell, you just sell everything. You don't ask, what am I selling? You just sell it all. And the system, in a lot of cases, just automatically triggers a sell. And you're seeing more and more algorithmic trading everywhere. So I don't actually believe any of this stuff. I've learned my lesson. I don't believe that the price is x or y on any specific day, because it necessarily is a full reflection of reality. What I would tell you is that what Iron's been doing for three or four years is taking a very long-term view on what we think is going to be one of the most acute shortages in human history, which is a shortage of compute at scale to power all of these digital revolutions that are playing out in real time. Now, in the very short term, that looks like AI. It looks like inference. It looks like anthropic, et cetera. But over longer periods of time, every single component of that value chain is stretched. You have large hedge funds like XTX in Europe building their own data centers, because they don't want to use anyone else's data centers. You've got Jane Street trying to contract computing resources directly for their own trading. from Coreweave and then on their own, because they need to find ways to do that. You've got people doing synthetic biology and genomics. They need data centers. You have traditional data centers. Everybody's competing for the same power. And then don't forget crypto. I understand humans have a very short attention span. And when they move on from Bitcoin for six months, they decide it's dead. But people have been saying Bitcoin's dead over and over again for 15 years. Every year or two, it's dead again. Don't be surprised when it comes back stronger. I mean, the global hash rate is still very high. It actually went up in this period of time where Bitcoin drew down 50%. So I think there's like a multi-decade play playing out here. And so I would argue, again, and I'm talking in my own book, but I think it's true, that there's no reason to over-educate people who are not as clued in to what's happening. If you were in the trenches, and you see an opportunity to create $50 or $100 or $500 billion of value, why would you spend your time educating the whole market just so a handful of people sleep better at night and aren't sad because their call options expired out of the money? It's not an important part. Elon Musk did not build any of his companies with the consideration of short-term call option holders. He was focused entirely on how he's going to shift the course of human history. via his companies, how he was going to shift the way humans do various things at the highest level. And I guarantee you, he wasn't spending any time following the stock price day-to-day or worrying about what people were saying on social media about him. He was just building. He was in the factories, making sure the stuff works. And having watched this team at Iron up close for four or five years now, that's what they do. They are aware of some of this stuff, but they're so focused on value creation that they're just not going to get involved in some of this stuff that's very short-term in nature or very noisy. The level of activity is extremely high. I can tell you for a fact there are a number of things going on that I haven't heard anyone talk about. So I appreciate these spaces and I appreciate the people here because this group has been closer to the truth a lot of the time over the last three, four years in terms of trying to predict what's happening, but nobody's predicting what I think is actually going to happen. And I've seen that before too. There have been many times where it was lonely over the last three or four years where you look dumb for believing what I believed, but if you just stuck with it, you're up 50X basically. So if you're up another 50X, will you care if some of the period of time over the course of two or three, four years is a little bit lonely or do you want the return? I'm here for the return. Like that's the only thing I can eat. Like I can't eat accolades or clapping or people liking me more. People here who know me well, like know that I don't care about that at all. In fact, if you care a lot about people liking you, then you're probably not gonna be very good at anything. You're definitely not gonna be good at investing 'cause investing requires you to consistently do things that are gonna be unpopular over long periods of time. So I think the unpopular thing right now is to build vertically integrated infrastructure at scale. And control the full stack, even if it looks expensive at the outset, because the value you're gonna create in doing that is going to outstrip what anyone else in the field is doing, even if in the short-term, it looks like what those other people are doing is working better for some short period of time. Maybe the market is rewarding them in the short-term. Maybe a lot of investors, because they're software investors, for example, in the cloud space, they don't actually understand physical infrastructure, so they don't understand how many things are gonna break yet. We saw this in Bitcoin mining in 2023. In the first half of 2023, all the way through most of the year, that year, people thought Marathon and Riot were the same companies as Iron or Cipher, and that was completely wrong. There were very few voices who were trumpeting what I was saying that whole year, which is that there's a huge gap between companies that are actually operationally excellent and those who aren't, and people actually own something and those that don't. And the market didn't reward that for two or three years, but then when it did, it was very dramatic. right? And you really got paid for holding that view, but RIP to the dozens and dozens, if not thousands of kid analysts that were here in 2023 and 2024 who are no longer with us because they capitulated or because they bet on the wrong horse or because they couldn't hold, right? They just couldn't stick with the thesis or they couldn't understand the thesis. So we're right back there again, right? Like things have just gotten bigger, like the stakes have gotten larger, the power shortage is massive, The demand, I've been saying this for six months, the pricing in the public market of the equities is not reflecting. It's reflecting it in SanDisk, but it's not reflecting it in the infrastructure developers, maybe possibly because the market incorrectly believes that the increased price of the memory is going to flow through to the overall infrastructure developer and actually cut their margins. I don't see that being the case. I think the growth and the margins are so massive at scale, that there's room for pricing of a lot of things in the supply chain to go up and for there still to be a margin for the integrator, the person who actually controls the full stack. We'll see, right? But the market's either completely irrational or it's correct. If it's correct, then basically the demand is so high that there's going to be margin in this industry for a lot of people, right? And the only thing that would concern me is if SanDisk turned around right now and went down 90% in the next three, four months, because that would imply that maybe That was all a mania in the 1st place and that the demand is actually going to come in. But that doesn't look like what we're seeing right now. There seems to be broad based demand and it's flowing through to every part of the supply chain. So anyway, like long story short, you know, it's required patience to get here. But if you had patience over the last three years, you got paid, I think, correctly for taking that risk. I personally didn't view it as that risky because I underwrote the balance sheets of companies like Iron and Cipher in December of 2022. Right. And as I've said repeatedly, I thought the balance sheets were worth three or four times the market caps at that time. So I was willing to pile in at that time, even when it was lonely and there was nobody talking about them. I don't think the current situation is that dissimilar. I mean, there's much, there are many more eyeballs on the setup now. There are many more people interested. There's a lot more noise, right? Even. people that are bullish from the sector are still saying stuff that sounds very kid analysty, right? Like where it's like they don't understand that like it actually takes a long time to build this stuff, right? It's actually quite challenging, but that's where the moat comes from, right? Like a lot of people signing deals right now, the deals sound good, but don't forget if they don't actually get this infrastructure online and they can't keep it online, the deal terms don't matter, right? So we've gone from what I think is going to be a transition period, right, where we went from, we have a bunch of firms that are called Bitcoin miners becoming AI data center developers, right? That was sort of like the first phase, and that started with like core scientific. Then we went to a phase where a couple of the sort of early movers were able to sign a lot of deals. Now that's being conflated with a bunch of asset-light cloud companies who, very similar to Mara last cycle, Their share prices have gone up a lot, but a lot of that's because nothing's happened yet. The only thing that's happened is people assigned big deals and made big promises with huge expectations, and we don't actually know who's good at this yet. We don't actually know who can actually build something at huge size and sustain it and run it, because if you can't actually do that, then the terms of the contracts don't matter, 'cause those contracts are gonna get torn up, and those customers are gonna have to go somewhere else to get their compute needs serviced. And that'll end up changing the pricing yet again. So if you monetized all of your capacity before the great reckoning, before a bunch of these guys blow themselves up, then you won't have any capacity available to monetize when the pricing goes up even further. And the pricing is still going up. There are companies in this sector who are being forced to sign NDAs now right? And not disclose who the customer is because the terms are so insane compared to six or nine months ago that those hyperscaler tenants don't want anyone to know what they paid, right? They don't want their name associated with it, but they need the compute. So look, it's so early, right? Like if you trade options and you care about the stock price this week or something, then we're not aligned. Like we're not on the same team. We're not playing the same game. I intend to be here until the job is done. Right? And my view, and the people who were here, like Bitcoin AI guy and others that were here in December of '22 and Q1 of '23, will remember me saying when Iron was between $1 and $3 that I thought it was a $200 stock. Nobody cared that nobody was listening. There were a few kid analysts who got really mad because they're like, you're insane. You're just leading people in the wrong direction. And then magically, somewhere between $20 and $75 a share, they all vanished. They all went back to the gas station or the supermarket or the movie theater, wherever they work. At least those jobs, by the way, aren't going to be disrupted by AI quite so quickly, some of these low-level software jobs. But eventually robots, the Optimist robot will probably do those jobs too. So I think you have a limited time right now to make really good decisions with your capital. So you have more optionality than most of the other people. And for my money, I'm continuing to bet on things that I think have high asymmetry. I think the investment thesis three or four years ago was much more murky. It took a lot more vision and a lot more guts and conviction. And the investment thesis now, for a lot of people, requires you to just see it clearly. You see the ball coming towards you. have the bat swing the bat and drive in the runs. Some people are afraid of their own success. They can see something playing out and they think it's too obvious. And so they don't swing the bat. No, like just put points on the board. If you put points on the board, you win games. If you win games, you get in the playoffs. If you win a lot of games in the playoffs, you get to the World Series. If you win the World Series, you're the champion. You don't have to overthink it. If you're seeing the ball clearly, ******* hit it. And I see a lot of people in these spaces who are overthinking. It's not that hard. There's a ton of demand. You're placing a bet on who's actually going to fulfill that demand. If somebody fulfills it, the potential value creation is orders of magnitude more than what's been created. And it's really that simple. I made my bet. I made a bet years ago that the best infrastructure operators would win. And in Bitcoin mining, that was very unpopular because there were brands that had spent a lot of money on marketing. They were spending $50 million on their CEO, and they were spending a lot of marketing, but it turned out, and with the benefit of hindsight, that they weren't actually very good at this. I think the same thing's happening again right now. People are gonna be basically hoodwinked. by marketing and overpaid CEOs. And that's just the nature of this game. And as I've said many times, this will be my final comment, but this is the most competitive game on the planet. This is public equity investing, right? Like this, it's not easy. Like anyone who comes in here and thinks it's supposed to be easy, like there are easier things to do, right? You can just go index, you can index, you can get a financial advisor, you can stick to your day job and you can retire at 65. Like if you want to make concentrated investments on high volatility, small cap equities, then you better really know who you are. You better have a thesis, and you better not let short-term trading action and kid analysts on X influence your thinking. You better have a view. That goes a little bit further out than that, because otherwise you're going to get completely whipsawed and blown up. And that includes the bulls, right? I've seen a lot of bulls, people who express bullishness for periods of time get completely whipsawed. And they're not with us anymore. And some of them did okay and some of them did less than okay. And as they said, some of them just are gone. I have no idea what happened. But I think, you know, going forward, if you understand what's happening here, you really got to zoom out. You still have to zoom out even now because until people start to deliver this product, this compute at scale, like really delivered at scale, including their own data centers, because there's a lot of greenfield and brownfield development going on across the sector and very few people have actually delivered. anything that's been signed in the last year, even Core Scientific, they're just like starting to deliver stuff that they signed in like almost two years ago. Cipher is going to deliver stuff like in the next three, four, five months that they signed recently, right? So everybody's moving in a different speed. The sell side analysts and a lot of the buy side investors still don't understand that. So let's give them some time. We needed time. Even as recently as April as last year, people still thought iron was worth 5. So it just goes to show you that even with the benefit of hindsight, you can see like how obviously mispriced some of the stuff is over time. So I'll just pause there. And again, there's only so much more I can say, right, in a period like we're in right now. But there's just a lot of stuff that's going to be going on that, and again, many of it has not been mentioned at all.

Frans Bakker: Yeah, but Mike, you say educating the market is not really necessary, but at the same time, you're saying that a large part of the buy side and the sell side analysts don't really get it. Isn't there a middle way that you would argue that maybe a bit more education would just be the sweet spot as opposed to just keeping your head down and executing and waiting for the EPS to hit? I think there is a middle way where, in particular, iron could really gain some, you know, a little bit more momentum spread out across a longer period of time, rather than. seeing a hockey stick up reaction when earnings are being presented. Don't you think that there is a little bit of nuance to this where you have said yourself when you came on a space after earnings, you said, I'm just going to give you guys a little bit of a debriefing because institutions get them from IR and you don't get it. IR is not reaching us on here as well, for example. So that's why we have all these spaces and all these stocks. I think Iron would not, it wouldn't look bad on Iron to increase education a little bit, a bit more spread out rather than picking their moments once a quarter. That's just my two cents. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that.

NASDAQ: Look, I don't speak for the company, but my perception is that you and a number of the other analysts are very well thought of and well regarded. by the Iron team. They're very aware of you. Obviously, you spent time with them. When we were all in Australia in December, I had a few beers with you. You and Big DGen were having quite a good time, as far as I could surmise. But look, I hear what you're saying. I just think that the real goal here is long-term value creation. And that's just not that's not what this is not the company speaking. This is Mike speaking as an investor. Remember, I'm an independent investor. I've invested in my own money in the company. I've invested significantly more of my own money than I've actually in terms of shares that I've actually received for serving on the board. Right. So just to be clear, I'm like one of the only public board directors you'll ever find who was not a founder of a company who came in. And after they joined the board, bought more shares than they've been given, right? Like the vast majority of public board directors are just exercising their RSUs and selling, right? So I really, and that's kind of my role, right? Like if you could be a fly on the wall in the board meetings, you would hear me advocating for a lot of the same things that the average retail investor would like to hear. But I also have access to all the information. And with the benefit of seeing all the information, I'm probability waiting that the way that things are being done right now is the best. path, because I just don't think even you, Franz, as much as you know, and I'd say you're in the top 99.9% of investors, you're still not seeing how big this is potentially going to be. Like, I actually think this is a potential trillion dollar company. Again, the potential, it's a long ways out to execute on that. But if that's the case, then I'm telling you, if we get closer to that, you're going to really appreciate how thoughtful the company was about not blowing its load really early on and demonstrating to everyone else exactly what to do. What happened over the last three years is that everybody else started to chase Iron. Iron went from being something like 1/30th of the market cap of Mara to now being like 6 times the market cap of Mara. Now Mara is saying that they're Iron. They're saying they're in AI and they're going to control the power and they're in infrastructure. Like how quickly, like remember, every time you get educated, so is everyone else. How quickly do you want us to be educating every single other company in the world about things that we're doing that they don't understand yet, that we know if we execute on are going to create huge leverage? I mean, Irene leapfrogged all the other so-called Bitcoin miners by playing the same game. We got the same criticism in 2023, in 2024, in 2025. You're not telling everybody enough stuff. The market, the price should be higher if the market understood. And it's like, no, the price will go. to the right level when the company executes on the strategy. But there's a concerted and focused effort here to not educate the wrong people, because this is a competitive business, and we think the opportunity is so massive, and we think the lead here is big enough and so misunderstood that we would like a little bit of sort of ignorance to persist. We want the smartest investors to sort of start to see it, but we don't really want all of the NeoClouds, right? Like as a company, we don't want all the NeoClouds to see exactly what the strategy is. So look, I think I said this before in like September, October last year, I said it's all going to be clearer soon, right? The sort of next phases. I think it'll all be clearer again soon, right? It's not different. Every year or two for the next 20 years, it's all going to be clearer again soon. At some point, right? Like you guys have gotten better at predicting the future than almost anyone else, but at some point you might actually predict. what's going to happen, but you're not predicting it right now, right? So I feel pretty good about the strategy because nobody's talking about what Iron, some of the things that Iron's actually doing. So just let them cook a little bit, right? Let them cook. I know they appreciate the support. You probably will get a lot more color this week, right? Because during earnings, they do like to provide more color. Candidly, like the audit committee meeting, I don't think is even until Tuesday. So I'll see all the audited financials and everything, I don't even have those. Again, I don't even think this week is important from an earnings standpoint for most of these companies, because most of these companies are in the process of building massive sites right now. And those sites need to actually be delivered, right? So in addition to securing new capacity and securing all the component parts in the value chain, and then working with customers, working with existing customers, securing new customers, right? building out the rest of the stack. Like there's just a lot of components to that. And if I was asked by the team specifically, like, what do you think about this? I would say, look, I respect all these guys, but I think you should continue to execute the strategy and focus on that and not so much on making sure everybody in the market is totally aware of everything that's going on. So again, it's not that nobody's listening. I assure you that everybody's listening, but there is some you know, internal belief. And from what I can tell, it's pretty consistent that like the focus needs to be on the value creation, the actual value creation, because I think there's some belief in that the market will recognize that at the right time.

Frans Bakker: Yeah, okay, fair enough. I get your points. And I think commercial sensitive things should not be spread out through the market. But I guess my point was more Like, for example, if you acquire a new batch of GPUs and you're being extremely conservative with your forward-looking guidance, you know, that is a choice as well. Being sandbagging, being conservative, this is something that, you know, it's not widely understood. Let me just put it like that. And of course, the earnings will tell at some point that, oh, they were pretty conservative back then, but I think, you know, at some point, a middle road would be preferred, at least by the retail community. But, you know, we are just a retail community. I guess you don't have to impress us. If you're still here at this point, I guess you know enough. So obviously, we will let you guys cook and we are looking forward to a colorful earnings. At least thanks for giving your two cents on this topic. And I made the comparison with the Bitcoin mining war from '24, '25 before myself. I am not very big believer of all these asset-like neo-clouds delivering on their capacity. I've been very skeptical of that particular Nibius. I've gotten a lot of criticism from the Nibius investors. because they are supposed to be, you know, the former Yanda of the former Google of Russia. So they are supposed to be very good at constructing data centers as well, even though they outsource most of that. So, you know, we're going to have to see if the reckoning will be this year or next year. But Yeah, I hope that it will come because I don't think the rising tide should lift all boats. I think there should be a couple of boats should just sink straight to the bottom. So yeah, that's just my two cents.

NASDAQ: Yeah, and just to be clear, I'm not rooting against any of the competitor companies. I just don't think those competitor companies will be able to deliver at scale over a long period of time. I think a number of them will fumble. It'll start with small cracks like we saw with one of the competitors' recent earnings where they said, hey, one of our data center operators is behind schedule. And then he went on CNBC and tried to defend that and basically admitted that the physical infrastructure part is harder. Even though a lot of the arguments they make in the market is that, well, the software is what really matters. So I don't know. I think software might matter. Specifically in the enterprise market, it might matter. But I think if you're serving hyperscalers at large scale, then it's the ability to deliver this infrastructure at huge scale and then keep it running, right? Like operating it at really high uptime and really high efficiency and making sure everything works. Like it's not plug and play. You can't just build a data center or outsource the building, which I think is even worse, right? Because some of these NeoCloud guys have like 12 different operators now. So they have like 12 different like setups and they're in different energy markets and they don't really control, like if something breaks, they've got to call a data center. They've got to call some guy at a data center that may or may not actually work for them in some cases or where there's some overlap in responsibilities. So it's unclear. And again, there's just going to be a lot of complexity here that it's not disclosed, right? Even if it was disclosed, it would be too much complexity for any one person to actually understand, if you could see the details of every single company in the sector's contracts, right? Everyone's speculating about just the economic terms, but what about the actual delivery? What happens over time if the price of the power goes up or if some of the rules about how these data centers connect to the grid change, right? Or if the sort of new generation chips are needed four or five years in on a longer term contract, But the cooling that was set up previously doesn't quite work or something about the way the data center was built isn't perfect for that. Who puts that cost? And if it isn't handled correctly and they're not able to meet the terms of the contract, like what happens then? So that'll happen. I think that's one thing that will almost certainly happen. The question just is, how does that overlap with these macro drawdown periods? Because eventually there's going to be like a 2000 style drawdown in AI. right? So what I suspect will happen is this CapEx cycle will run two, three, four more years, because it seems as of right now, that's what's visible. You can kind of see that on the runway now. And then at some point, the market will probably predict, it'll start to predict the slowdown in that CapEx spending. It doesn't necessarily mean that the CapEx will reverse or that like the spending in the sector will go negative necessarily. But if If the rate of change over time slows down from this very high rate to a lower rate, you could see some compression and multiples. And during those periods of compression is when you might see a rationalization of some of the multiples within the sector. So the relative valuations might actually start to sort of get closer to reality when you're actually in a sort of macro or industry-wide style drawdown. And we saw that in the Bitcoin mining space. When things were good for parts of 2023, it was like a beta of one. Everything ran together, including the ********* companies. In 2024, you started to get dispersion. And then by 2025, after the April drawdown, by then you could see the winners for the kind of full first half of the cycle for the sort of Bitcoin mining. I think that same thing will play out here with some of these AI data center developers where Right now, some of the worst ones with the biggest brands that have appear to have a lead because maybe they were a little earlier to the space and they got a little bit more scale earlier. Again, totally reminiscent of Marathon Digital. Same thing. Biggest brand, biggest exo hash seem to be ahead. And even for most of 2023, the market couldn't tell the difference. And then you started to see the cracks show up in 2024. Oh, we have weather events. in Hardin, Montana. Oh, like we only have 50% of our capacity online. Oh, **** maybe we should own some infrastructure. Okay, we're going to buy somebody else's random infrastructure, right? You've already started to see that in the NeoCloud space, but because there's so much hype and Anthropic and OpenAI haven't even gone out yet, we haven't had that reckoning. So I just would caution people, this is a long game. And so for periods of time, it'll look like the market doesn't understand. And then for periods of time, the market will rationalize, and it will start to understand quite quickly, in many cases, things. It took two to three years to understand, and then all of a sudden understands it overnight, which is what we saw in this sector over the last three years. And I think that'll happen again. I can't predict for you when. That's just something I've seen happen. And as an independent investor, I can tell you it's very likely to happen again, because it just happens over and over again. And my job is just to pick the ones that I'm confident at the end of that rationalization process will be back on top where they belong. The market's not dumb, right? Like if you actually deliver some of this stuff, like all this hype around AI is part hype in the short term because everyone's excited about the future of Claude and... and OpenAI and all these IPOs and how it's going to sort of revolutionize the way people work and the economy and all that. And then some of it is real, right? Like where there's real profits here, if you are operating in a supply constrained environment and you have the supply, right? You're the dealer. Like you should be able to print pretty massive profits over some period of time. The challenge is at the early stages, it's hard to understand who's actually any good. And so people will be confused, they'll be easily tricked. I saw this in 23, 24, like a lot of people who purported to be smart, they sounded smart, they had spreadsheets, but they'd never actually like spending time in the business. They didn't really know the teams. They didn't know the difference between a great CEO and a guy who was just an empty suit, who was getting paid a lot of money, who was really good at gaming the system and getting people to pay them, but didn't actually know how to build anything or operate anything. And I think we have more of that here, and it's just going to take the market a while to figure it out. So that's about all I have to say tonight. I hope everybody has a great week. I hope everybody has a great year, because I think, obviously, with Anthropic and OpenAI going out, we've got a lot more capital and mindshare coming to this space before even the short-term cycle is over. So I suspect what's happening right now macro-wise is And I called this a month or two ago, is that there's going to be a lot of noise about the Strait of Hormuz and oil prices and Trump and IRGC and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like as many acronyms as you can come up with. And then silently and quietly, even without any real resolution, the VIX would start to fall. The uncertainty index, as measured by a number of different things, would start to come in. Asset prices would go back to all-time highs one after another, and we seem to be in the middle of that now, small-cap index is ripping. S&P and NASDAQ are at all-time highs. Bitcoin's above 80,000. Liquidity is likely to come in. We're going to have a new Fed chair, right? So don't overlook the fact that there's a lot of external factors that can explain the last six months that may have nothing to do with the actual fundamentals. And again, I say that to somebody who sees a lot of the fundamentals. I'm just saying it's just accelerating. I don't believe that there's any like real merit to looking at the last six months and saying the prices were necessarily correct. I don't think Bitcoin was worth 126 in October and then worth 60 in February. I don't think that that was the real number. I think we will find the real number for Bitcoin and we will find the real value of AI data centers, but I don't think that process is anywhere near playing itself out. So I'll give you guys, I'll seed the the mic back to the folks here, and I appreciate you guys having me.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Thanks for coming up, Mike, and we appreciate your efforts in the space to educate on Bitcoin and AI. We are two and a half hours in or two hours and 35 minutes, and I'm probably going to close the space out here unless Franz had any closing thoughts or Bitcoin AI guys up here. But overall, I'm excited for a good week. And I would echo what Franz said, where I think there is a middle ground, but I also do think management is aware of what we do here. And I don't think Dan would come and interview with Franz and I in March unless they were somewhat conscious of what we're trying to accomplish here and how we try and tell the story of our investment. But Franz or AI guy, you guys can close this out and I will shut this down.

Speaker 3: Iron still mines Bitcoin, by the way, guys. Just a heads up.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: It's that Bitcoin's pumping.

Speaker 3: I'm bullish on the short term. I'm bullish on the video term.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: My ears perked up when, you know, Mike said, there's another 50x. So just for the people who didn't hear that, you know, there's a lot more upside. But so many points have been already brought up. I share, I saw one thing that was interesting. The flatbed trucking spot rates hit an all time high and data center construction is 7% of that.

Speaker 3: I shared this in the nest, but everything is supporting our bull case, right? All the data points say, you know, power is still bottom neck, grid is so important. I don't want to. keep repeating these points.

Super Sane: But don't forget about Bitcoin.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: I think crypto could seriously pump this year. People aren't really positioned for that. Iron, of course, is phasing out of Bitcoin mining and doing something that pays them 10 times more, which makes sense. But when typically, typically, would Bitcoin, did crypto start pumping risk assets

Super Sane: start doing well.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: And, since Mike brought up 2022, it was pretty bullish on the sector back when no one cared.

Super Sane: I think people don't care about Bitcoin and crypto again, which is very bullish.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: So if it does go on a run like it typically does around this time and, you know, when no one cares, I think

Speaker 3: a lot of people are going to be FOMOing back in And, you know, if Bitcoin doubles, I think Iron could three, four X in the same period of time.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: And that's, you know, lines up with my bull case for Iron this year, which is, you know, still in the 140 to 160, not including Euphoria, which is 160 to 200. So I think, you know, I think it's still a good time to be a bull and

Speaker 3: looking forward to more updates.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Thanks, AI guy. Franz, anything else? Otherwise, it's time to go home.

Frans Bakker: No, nothing from my end. I guess I'll have to listen back to everything that Mike said, but it sounds like, you know, he trying to like discount what he said. First, he said it's going to be colorful. week with earnings and then but you know I I I guess maybe I'm leaning bullet. I'm leaning bullish after what he said for now.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Yeah, I mean it's neutral or bullish and honestly, regardless of Mike, like whatever happened in past spaces like. I don't think you just dismiss all of the evidence that we discussed earlier because Mike came up and even though he said this is potentially a trillion dollar company because he made a comment about call options that were ****** tomorrow, part of my language. But I like I just I don't buy it. And I, I believe that things are looking good this week and he's in a position where you know, he's a public investor, all that good stuff, but he is still attached to a public company and can't compromise his position there. So if anyone was looking for him to say, we signed Anthropic tomorrow, like that's not what's going to happen, but he still provided great context as to what's going on in the space. So I will close things out here. I look forward to this week. We will Maybe do something Thursday after the call. I can talk with Franz and check his availability, but there's a lot going for Iron, not only this week, but going forward. And I think part of Franz and my constructive criticism for management and the board is. We might not necessarily expect to see a trillion dollar market cap tomorrow, but there are incremental steps along the way that help you get there. And I think at a minimum, if we hear some sort of roadmap for the next six to 12 months, let alone 24 months, I think that would give people more of a reason, most notably institutions. So again, that we're not dealing with the ********. at high frequency traders that try and screw with pricing throughout. And just it's just noise that you can buy and hold and do all that and ignore it. And that's probably the best thing to do. But it is kind of crazy that the daily activity that we deal with, it's just messed around with and I guess that's the opportunity for those that know in the interim. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you everyone for joining and we'll talk soon. Have a great night.