$iren Sovereign Supremacy 6/21/26

Hosted by @₿itcoin ₿utcher 🥩 🐑 🐷 · 2026-06-19 · Tags: IREN

TLDR

Participants argued that IREN is shifting from relying primarily on hyperscaler infrastructure deals toward sovereign AI, government, and Fortune 1000 deployments built with NVIDIA, Dell, and Mirantis. The discussion remained strongly bullish but emphasized that completing Horizon One, improving shareholder communication, securing balanced financing, and demonstrating operational execution are critical to validating the thesis.

Speakers

Notable quotes

Transcript

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Thanks for waiting, everyone. I'm going to get Blake up stage to speak. Our featured guest tonight. And I appreciate everyone's understanding for a late start. I was hosting another space and we were waiting on Franz. I had some familial obligations and I'm hoping Franz can join sooner than later so that he can interact with Blake as we talk through sovereign supremacy as it relates to IRAN. So with that, Blake, welcome to the stage. Why don't you tell us about yourself, a little background. I haven't had a chance to interact beyond a DM with you, but I want to learn a little more about you, your relationship with Brian, and let's get to know you first before we dive into IRAN.

Blake: Yeah, hey guys, how's it going? Thanks. It's good to meet everybody. I've honestly just been a long time listener here and this community is unique. And just like probably a lot of people on this call, AI boom starts going nuts and you're looking for those investment opportunities. And my background is On the sales side, I work in software sales and lead go to market for a software company. And so I won't pretend to be anywhere near some of the infrastructure experts that are on this call. But like, again, like a lot of people probably just see this as such an unbelievably unique time and opportunity to invest. make a bunch of money in it. And so mostly I've been, you know, sitting back for the better part of the last year plus listening to these conversations, trying to read and, you know, interpret as much as possible. And that's, yeah, you know, that's what led me to kind of make some predictions around Iran and see where they're heading. I don't think they're even that crazy predictions now, you know, based on where we go, we'll get into those today. But really, I think like my ears started perking up on the brand and marketing push for Iron. And a lot of us probably saw the early advantages the company had with their infrastructure, thought they could essentially flip that infrastructure to the hyperscalers and make a good chunk of money. And then whatever the timeline is now, four, five, six months, you know, it would appear that there's been a significant shift in their go-to-market strategy. And that's when I started really scrubbing in and trying to, you know, probably validate, like, again, you know, sentiment's been kind of poor, and hopefully we can flip that tonight, but validate the kind of new opportunity that they're going after from a go-to-market perspective and how they're going to position this and the bigger opportunity here, which is super exciting. So yeah, that's that's my background. And again, thanks for the opportunity and happy to just jump into it unless unless you want me to pause here.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Before we talk through your predictions and your thesis, maybe as a good primer and a way to set the table, you had a post earlier with respect to. We weren't able to confirm whether this has been executed or not, but we saw the blog post from Dell related to the Prince George site that described a potential partnership with the Canadian government for roughly the 1200, 1100 or 1200 GPUs that God particle confirmed or not sitting on the balance sheet as of last earnings. And it's possible and Franz isn't on yet, but from talking with him in the background, believe that we possibly pitched the gig, but we missed out on it. But I think before I ask you your thoughts on it, my initial reaction to it is if that blog post is from November when they were discussing the or finishing up the Microsoft deal, the initial 300 megawatts at Horizon one through four. But if they were already pitching sovereign AI in November of last year, then to me, I'm actually that makes me more bullish because quite often Mike will come up here and say, you guys aren't even touching the surface. And then I want to push back at Mike and be like, yeah, Mike, because I'm not in the ******* boardroom with you. Like, of course we don't know what's going on. Like, I wish we did. And that's part of the excitement and or frustration is we don't know what's going on necessarily all the time. But I what I would say, and maybe you can react to that, your initial reaction on that, Blake, is if they were already pitching the Canadian government in November, then Sovereign was probably on their mind from the get-go, and they saw this opportunity probably through their interactions, if I had to guess, with hyperscalers and weren't happy with those conversations. And the way I feel about it now, it makes more sense to me that they pursued Mirantis and that acquisition because Mirantis has that experience and that could bolster they're offering as they pitch it to new, whether they pitch the Canadian government again or a different sovereign government or local municipality or however that will work. I do think that this was something they had in mind and now some of the pieces that have come into play the last few months make a little more sense with the benefit of hindsight being 2020. So maybe you could speak to your thoughts on that. You felt the need to post it and then we can dive into your predictions and I'll pull up your post and we'll post it in the nest.

Blake: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it just seems like a great signal of where they're headed. And it certainly was like interesting timing. Yeah, it was back in November and Dell Dell was the one that promoted it and posted about it. And obviously Iron's been, you know, hitched at the hip with with Dell and it would overall, you know, whether that project came to fruition or not, probably just doesn't really matter. To your point, like it's clear that this is the way they're thinking, this this is the way that the business wants to go. And It's certainly a big signal and it just signals like it also lines up with the marketing push. it was kind of interesting where right back in September, October, November of last year, we were fresh off the Microsoft deal, excited about it. Obviously, it's still a great deal. And then gearing up for the next big, you know, hopefully mega deal as Sweetwater was getting energized and all of that. And then at that time, though, that's really when the marketing side started going nuts. And we started seeing Iron's name everywhere. And, you know, this was even like before the Sphere and all of that. But they're running ads and their brand is showing up in Australia and things like this. I remember kind of like one of my friends joking, like, why would you why would you put your brand everywhere? You know, if you're just trying to win over Anthropic and you don't need to like if you're trying to sell to 7 to 10 hyperscaler companies or leading AI labs, it's an extremely different strategy. It's very expensive to do what they're doing on the marketing side of the house. And they just wouldn't need to do it if their end customers were the hyperscalers. And so, yeah, there was this mismatch in terms of how they were showing up in the market in late last year, and then where we all probably thought they were headed with these deals. But that really like-- I mean, it comes back to the core strategy that-- I think you're right. They started shopping their assets. Dan has always been just extremely focused on shareholder value. And if he takes $1 out of the company, making sure that that investment gives back $2, $3, $4. And I think they ultimately came to the conclusion that these bare metal deals selling to the hyperscalers just weren't maximizing the assets that they had. And that's really interesting because the darling right now, and I know this, I'm actually long Nebius too. I think there's plenty of room for both to be winners here. But even Nebius themselves, who's become this darling, right, and in this neo-cloud space, the kind of short-term leader here, at least as far as their stock price, But they've been very explicit themselves in saying that these hyperscaler deals are not their end game. Their CEO, Arkady, was recently on with Excel, you know, one of their big backers, and they were breaking down the business. And he very clearly emphasized a few things, like, at least for me, when I was listening to that interview, he was emphasizing, you know, the need to have an unbelievable emphasis on the construction pipeline. He said, you need to know where the next gigawatts are coming from. He was very much speaking about vertical integration in the way that Iron has really been leading the market here. And you're listening to all this and you're like, well, this is the CEO of Nebius in his focal points right now. I'm getting more and more excited about what Iron has been harping on for the last couple of years. But then specific to the deal strategy here, like He went so far as to say that they're building this bare metal capacity for the Microsoft AI lab, same with their Facebook deal that they're delivering. And they had huge dollar values in terms of what hit the headlines. But when you look under both of those deals, still a bunch of money was obviously funneling to them for those bare metal, for the bare metal capacity, billions and billions. But then the back half of the deal was basically a backstop. And the whole thing that they're trying to do is get some money in and then go straight back to the bank and go finance building out their own cloud for the rest of the market. And so ultimately, Iron and Nebius seem to have landed on the same conclusion that these hyperscalers are just simply not the target market, and we would love to sell capacity and services to enterprise customers directly. And I think it's important to like for all of us to take a step back here and just, you know, remember the opportunity here. I mean, like, again, a podcast with the Andreessen guys and they're chatting with Google and Cisco leaders about this build out and those guys are saying this is a combination of the internet build out, the space race, and the Manhattan Project combined. And all of that, this whole re-industrialization is going to require 10 to 100 times more computing in the long run than the cloud build out. And for context, like I think somebody, can correct me here, but I think AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, over the last, 20 or so years, however long it's been, they built out somewhere around 20, 25 gigawatts to support their cloud business, these enormous trillion dollar companies and cloud businesses. So when you start to like think about that in context and you're doing a conservative 10X is 200 gigawatts, and a very aggressive 100X is 2,000 gigawatts, but all that to be said, It's a joke now, right? But we're still early innings. And at those numbers, even our communities, we talk about five gigawatts and six gigawatts and one to three. But at 200 to 2,000 gigawatts, you could very quickly see how land power, data center construction, all this stuff that Iron's been harping on. The winner here is potentially going to be running, you know, dozens to hundreds of gigawatts. And so still addressing that fundamental challenge, it does seem like the most important thing. Absolutely. I think it was Crusoe's like SVP of product management broke it down into three categories for them, energy, data center development, and then cloud AI services. And he was just saying like the energy cycles that they deal with, they're handled in years, data center development now handled in quarters, and even that's been accelerated. And then the software lifecycle is in weeks. And you know that that software development lifecycle for anyone who's using these AI products and building, it just continues to compress. You know, it's unbelievable. And so I guess all this to be said, like I truly believe that there's going to be a lot of winners here. We're going to see the next new trillion-dollar companies, and there'll be many of them, if this goes like people are thinking, these trillion-dollar companies are going to emerge over the next 5 to 10 years. And lastly, I guess, to your point, Bitcoin, on like the strategy here and that emerging back in November, it does seem like Iron and Nebius came to the same conclusion, like because this opportunity is so big and because it's underserved, we can sell this infrastructure, we can sell these services directly to enterprises. And the reason that I'm long both is that I think, I actually think Nebius is very well-positioned to serve commercial, mid-market, lower enterprise. And I'm sure they're going to land some big companies, like they seem to be able to do that. But personally, I think they are really well-positioned to serve commercial mid-market businesses. And if you go to Nebius's website and you kind of look at the case studies and the customers that they're promoting, it's generally right now, like aside from these hyperscaler deals, it's smaller businesses. And, and companies that, you know, you can kind of think of like a product led growth motion, but people who probably want to build agents, they want to build AI, and they're looking to, you know, spin up that infrastructure basically immediately. And you could go to Nebius and they'll, they're, they're obviously aiming to, to stand up their cloud product and they're making it, you know, that that's the market that they know really well, tech forward, hop on their website and get rolling with cloud, with, with with this AI infrastructure, but I don't think Ayren is going after that. Like, I do think Ayren is more so going after the Fortune 1000. And they're doing that in tandem with Nvidia and Dell and, you know, these, it goes back to how the Fortune 1000 procures and they work with these massive partners that they've worked with for years and these incredibly complex deployments and multiple companies and multiple throats to choke if something goes wrong. And so, yeah, I think there's two markets there, both incredibly enormous, and Iron is really setting themselves up well to go after that Fortune 1000 market.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: I'm going to welcome Franz tonight first, and then Blake, I had a question about your background before we jump into your predictions. Franz, how are you this evening?

Frans Bakker: Hey, Butcher. Hey, Blake. I'm good. What's up, guys?

₿itcoin ₿utcher: So we just got things kicked off. You didn't miss too much. We were learning about Blake's background in software sales, which I had a follow-up question for. And then we were talking about your commentary as it related. Maybe you can fill in if I misspoke on your behalf, but I was personally bullish on Blake's, not only his predictions, but the post specifically as it pertains to Prince George and the possibility that iron as early as November, which means probably a few months earlier, was already thinking of sovereign AI opportunities, which in my mind, even if they didn't close the deal, meant that they were probably looking at their options as they were trying to sell first, whether it was a co-location deal, second, bare metal, and they kept probably getting frustrated with the feedback that they were getting from the marketplace or they were optimistic given the deals being signed outside in the marketplace that they thought to maximize shareholder value, it was in their best interest to go down this path and they were doing it as early as November. So that was kind of our initial discussion point. So feel free to add anything to that. Otherwise, I wanted to ask Blake a little more about software sales, that what he's selling and how it relates to how he's impacted with AI before we touch on his iron specific predictions.

Frans Bakker: Yeah, keep going. Just keep the topic going that you were rolling out.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Okay, so Blake, if you don't mind before we talk through your posts, let me get a better understanding. You had mentioned software sales earlier. I think it's... I personally, like I have a small business, I understand a retail facing business, but you have a unique perspective as someone who's in the field who understands the sales cycles of deals as it pertains to software. So maybe you can explain to everyone your day-to-day a little better at a very high level and how it might parallel what Dan's trying to accomplish right now with Will and the rest of their team.

Blake: Yeah, for sure. So yeah, I've been in software sales for a while and in general, if people know the space, I've mostly been in the middleware category, like integration and now workflow, automation and orchestration. It's essentially, you know, taking all these SaaS systems and on-prem infrastructure that's exploded over the last couple of decades and finding a way to tie it all together and extract, you know, data out of these systems, make it actually useful, form the integrations. And so, yeah, I mean, everyone in the space, I mean, obviously, like, we're feeling the impact of AI as it, you know, we're saying it's this big shift, but certainly on the ground in software, You can feel it. I mean, you can see it in all of the software stock performances, or certainly most of them, that just the capability to build software has collapsed. It's become way, way easier. And these moats that software companies built over many years were typically through hiring engineers. And those engineers would write a bunch of code and stand up these amazing products and that ability to write code now with the Agentic capabilities is, you know, effectively, you know, headed to zero if it's not already there. And you can talk to really any software engineer in the business, like none of them have written code themselves in the last year or two. They are all using these agents. What that does is just allow the ability to replicate software so much faster. You see it first now in products that were relatively easy to build and solved relatively simple problems and mostly sold down market to less sophisticated companies. A lot of these software companies that have really Their stock has just plummeted. It's truly because if you wanted to, you could rewrite it in hours, days now. Because code has just become infinitely cheaper, at least easier to write, more people can write it. And so you'll see, there's a whole bunch of tools now, but you'll see whole companies replicated instantly, almost. especially for like easier to use software. Now that, you know, it's still to be seen, can the ServiceNow's and Salesforces and enormous, you know, multi-billion dollar enterprise focus softwares be rebuilt? They certainly can't be rebuilt, you know, one-shotted through some agentic code right now. But, you know, if you're thinking like the iron guys and you're sitting in that boardroom and again, you're kind of, focused on those three pillars that the Crusoe guy laid out, energy data center development and cloud AI services, you can very easily envision this world where out of all the priorities that you're going to handle, software is just simply not as important as going and capturing the energy and the infrastructure. And that's why we're all here on the siren call, because we fundamentally believe that. but certainly like, you know, clog code and now it'll get super interesting with Cursor getting bought by SpaceX and OpenAI and all their fun. Like, yeah, the ability, you know, the one thing that AI is incredible at is writing code and that will allow rebuilding applications to become way faster and easier.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Great. Now, as it relates to, you had talked about, orchestration and integration. Can you speak to, does any of your work overlap with some of the same integration and orchestration that Mirantis might be doing for Iron going forward? Or would you consider your business kind of siloed off with that? Like, how does it relate to the newest addition to the Iron family?

Blake: Yeah, not really, honestly. And some of the, I'm sure there are people on this call or just in the space that would be, you know, much more savvy understanding Mirantis's business and the orchestration of hardware itself. You know, at the end of the day, the integration orchestration space I'm in is connecting software systems together and building more business workflows. So I won't try to pretend like I know the ins and outs of Mirantis versus some of the other, you know, capabilities that like another Neo Cloud competitor would have and how it stacks up.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: No problem. Let's skip that then and jump into your posts if you don't mind. And let's just kind of you had two predictions to address Mike's request. So why don't you walk through it and your reasoning for everyone and Franz and I can follow up with any questions we have that come to mind.

Blake: Yeah, sounds good. I mean, yeah, now looking at them, like, to me, they don't even seem that crazy and maybe they won't be, you know, perfect, but I think both are kind of directional where at least personally, I hope Iron is headed. And the first is that, you know, my first prediction was that they wouldn't sign a hyperscaler or a Frontier AI lab deal, at least this year, you know, with the caveat that I could very reasonably see them extend their Microsoft contract and add on the bare Rubens, and that would be fantastic. You know, but I guess like whether that is true or not, whether they sign a hyperscaler AI lab deal, maybe they will, I don't think they will, but it doesn't really matter. I guess, you know, the point here being that, to me, it's kind of clear that these hyperscaler deals, these AI lab deals, because they can bring their own software and their own engineering, at the end of the day, they would be bare metal deals most likely. And those bare metal deals are essentially financing levers to get more money and go build their own cloud and serve the enterprises like we've talked about. And so I don't think it'll happen, but even if it does, I don't think it's even directional of where Iron wants to go. I think they would just do it as a way to, again, gain more credibility. and gain some more money. But ultimately, to me, it's not their fundamental strategy. And again, that's why they're marketing all across the globe, because they want to win over everyone, all these businesses, but not these seven to 10 companies. And, you know, I think, you know, for the hyperscalers, the reason, I think it's a combination of the money that they get back on their bare metal deals. It's not it's not, you know, the end goal for them. But then I think we also need to turn to Nvidia, you know, at this point. And Nvidia is like the Wizard of Oz right now, right? They're the largest company in the world for a reason. They're the king of AI, and they're pulling all the strings behind the scenes. And and so I think we have to like. you know, recognize what's going on with Nvidia and where they want to take the market and where specifically they want to take this NeoCloud market because they're investing in basically every NeoCloud and they really want them all to win because if they all win, then Nvidia wins and they keep buying more GPUs from them. And that's fantastic. But it really breaks down into like, where is Nvidia focused? And on the one hand, they're getting pressure from the hyperscalers themselves. both from a competitive perspective and a financial perspective. On the financial side, I think they want to de-risk where their payments are coming from. This is actually something I think Michael Burry is super passionate about. He thinks Nvidia is going to ultimately collapse, and that'll collapse the whole market simply because they're so concentrated in getting their payments from hyperscalers and mostly Microsoft. And I really do think NVIDIA sees this market, they see this opening, they see this window where they don't need to necessarily rely just on the hyperscalers anymore. They can actually go stand up and create this market that is the NeoCloud market, this AI services market that would ultimately de-risk their business and create way more buyers of their product. You know, and you can go to their Q1 earnings call or honestly, like Jensen talks about it all the time in his talks now. And he's been super intentional about breaking down that market. And he splits it now between the hyperscaler business and what they call the AC business, A-C-I-E, which stands for AI cloud, industrial and enterprise. And this is really the market, this is where sovereign AI shows up and regional AI clouds and industrial AI factories, and it is that it's everyone, you know, outside of the hyperscalers. And it's growing like crazy. Like in their Q1 earnings, Nvidia reported that $38 billion of their revenue from the data center business came from the hyperscalers, but that segment actually increased, you know, 12% quarter over quarter. On the other hand, the AC revenue, this AI cloud industrial and enterprise revenue was $37 billion, so basically 50/50, but that segment was growing 31% quarter over quarter, and sovereign AI specifically for NVIDIA increased more than 80% year over year. And so they're simply investing in the part of their data center business that's growing the fastest, they really want this market to win. And then also hit on, just the competitive pressure, but because there's so much demand for AI, all the hyperscalers are also building and selling their own chips. And you've got AWS with Trainium and Google with TPUs and Meta. And Elon has recently said he's going to build another chip. And so again, it's about de-risking for Nvidia as well, that ultimately they seem to want to create more of an open source focused market and service this AC business directly. And so I guess, yeah, just kind of rounding out, I just, whether Iron signs the hyperscaler deal or not, again, doesn't really matter. To me, it would just be a financing lever. Thankfully, one thing I never lose sleep over at night with Iron specifically is the financing side of this. I think for a lot of companies, it's an enormous risk, but I guess just, given these guys' backgrounds and... in infrastructure banking, that seems to be their bread and butter. They get a lot of energy from it. They put a lot of press out for it. And I just never really worry on the financing side. I don't lose sleep over that side of it. I think they're going to nail it. So That's why I think, ultimately, they're taking the shot. And I do think, you know, Bitcoin, back to your point, I think it's more opportunistic. I don't think it necessarily came from a defensive position. I think it came from an offensive position that, given all these factors and Nvidia's backing and Nvidia's interest in supporting this AC market, I just think, you know, you got the world's biggest company at your back, like, and you got to figure we've only seen part of the announcements and part of the strategy and a very small part of it. And then ultimately, you know, they'll go build this out. And that's where like a lot of times, I think it's kind of an unfair comparison, like Ayron's offering gets compared directly today, like their capabilities to these other Neo clouds. But I think we have to look at Iron's offering holistically as the AI factory. And this is something that Brian has been very vocal about for a long time now. And to be honest, when I started following this space and listening to Brian, I kind of thought it was just like a marketing term. I was like, oh, that sounds cool. Like I certainly want to be invested in a company that's building AI factories, but I thought it was Iron, more so trying to position themselves as the AI factory company. But that's really flipped on its head. I mean, this is NVIDIA leading the charge of what an AI factory is and positioning it front and center in their business. And you can see that they've, you know, kind of going back to winning the Fortune 1000, you know, NVIDIA has teamed up with a bunch of these partners, Dell being a very prominent one to stand up these offerings that these partners like a Dell can go and sell directly to their customers. And it's a whole combination of, you know, a whole bunch of software products and documentation, engineering, you know, standards and There's a lot that goes into it. And that goes back to my earlier point on Nebius. Like, you're not going to sell an AI factory to a 200 person, you know, startup, scale up type company. It's just, you know, they need a knife and you're trying to sell them a shotgun or whatever. You're going to sell these AI factories to massive companies that are extremely complex. And these enterprises that are really overhauling their company and putting AI in the middle of their workflows, in the middle of their data, they need that to be sovereign and protected. And I mean, just in I think it was March like and I'm sure this has changed, but Dell's putting out numbers that there's they've sold, you know, this AI factory concept to a total of 4,000 customers, which is crazy. And early adopters, we're seeing two and a half times more ROI with that product. And I'm sure there's kind of all kinds of different implementations of it. But, you know, we certainly don't have a gigawatt plus Dell AI factory yet, but you can imagine that's what they're working on. And that's what I want to see ultimately sold to one of these sovereign markets.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Blake, one thing that you mentioned earlier, you didn't, when you say a frontier lab, I'm assuming you're referencing Anthropic and OpenAI. Can you give me a better understanding of why you don't think those two companies are a good fit for Iron's strategy as you see it?

Blake: Yeah, I, maybe I'm, a little crazy, maybe they're arrogant here. I actually, I personally don't think Iron would think of them as a strong partner. And so, yeah, I'm definitely talking about Anthropic. Mostly that's, you know, you turn on X, you couldn't find a post a couple of weeks ago where somebody was predicting Anthropic would buy up all of Sweetwater. But I actually, to me, they're a little bit different story than the hyperscales. The hyperscales are very stable. and extremely creditworthy partners. And obviously that was something that Iron leadership harped on when signing the Microsoft deal that, you know, better credit than the US government. And it just seems like, you know, again, probably giving these guys finance backgrounds and just experience, they've been through a lot of cycles and they understand the stability here. And they've been very vocal about building a business for five, 10, 15, 20 years. And while it feels as though Anthropic is, you know, an unstoppable force right now, and then they've kind of won, we're again, just so incredibly early relative to business cycles and, you know, trends. And to me, I could see Iron just not willing to take that risk. And let's say, you know, Anthropic is Yahoo or, you know, some Some other comparison, and look, I'm not, and topic's an unbelievable business. I'm by no means saying that, but you could, you know, token costs are exploding. Everyone is now looking towards the open source models. U.S. leadership has been, you know, vocal about trying to promote alternative open source models within our markets. The Chinese models are really not that far behind, and so whether it's for, maybe it won't be for all workloads, but it's not crazy to me to see, you know, the market turn on Anthropic and OpenAI here pretty quickly. And again, kind of just putting credit risk towards a business like Iron that seems to, A, if they're going to sign a hyperscaler, which they've obviously been incredibly like hesitant to do, It's going to be one that is incredibly stable. They've done Microsoft and Nvidia now. And then B, you know, they don't seem to actually want to sell to that market. They want to go straight to, you know, an Eli Lilly or AT&T or like businesses that are incredibly stable and will be here for a long time.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: I only ask because most recently, The flavor of the week in the equity markets is XAI via, well, as a subsidiary or whatever the legal ownership is from SpaceX with their recent deal with Anthropic and Google, just the rate at which those entities were willing to pay for available compute now That's why I kind of push back specifically on Anthropic, but more so, maybe because of your background, you can speak to it a little better, but can you better, and as a Navius shareholder, can you explain what with Mirantis, when you say that Iron is going to be pursuing an open source model as they integrate and orchestrate with Mirantis, what that means to you and how that differs from a hyperscaler or Navius and how they're uniquely how Iron, I should say, is uniquely positioned in the marketplace now.

Blake: Yeah, it does seem super like interesting here. And I think like, you know, now we get into sovereignty and And why would these companies, again, whether it be Fortune 2000 or a government, or why would they want more open source offerings? Ultimately, they don't want to be locked in. They don't want to be locked in to a specific model. They don't want to be locked into certain infrastructure. They don't want to be, and that's where like there's sovereignty in all these different angles. And I wrote this in the post, but you've got, a lot of people think the national sovereignty, the Canadian government being a great example, the US government, the Australian government. But you've got, you know, enterprise sovereignty where these businesses want control over their AI systems and the data. Flowing through them is really their only mode now, and all these models, these major AI labs are kind of fundamentally trained on the same data, right? They're trained on the open Internet, and so being able to use your own data. and train it on an open source model, you know, within your four walls of your bank or your pharma company or your healthcare organization or manufacturing, or certainly like government where it's, you know, mission critical operations. That is the moat and the advantage because you know your customers best, you know your business best. And you're also not giving away that data to somebody else potentially that could, you know, replicate your moat. So that's that's why I think the sovereign angle is so popular. Going back to the, you know, enterprise I.T. Don't don't rent your brain. And that's been passed around now. But, you know, these companies want to build themselves and protect their businesses ultimately, so that they can't be replicated and talked about how easy now it is for someone to build a new product, build a new software in particular, like overnight. Well, if they're able to, you know, use open source models and train up and build something that's truly unique to their business, that's going to allow them to, you know, protect their business for longer. And that's where I see the Fortune 1000 going. You know, as far as Mirantis plays into it, I think, again, I won't pretend to know too much about their specific capabilities. And there's certainly people in this community that can go deeper into it. But the reason I, you know, my second prediction was some type of, you know, AI factory that specifically within this sovereign theme would be tied to government or government. adjacent work. And I can very plausibly see that government adjacent work being something in, let's say, like the Department of Energy and one of the big labs or something that it would be easier to crack into. You're not necessarily in like the Department of War, but potentially something on the Fed sieve side, like in healthcare, energy or something like that. But Ultimately, the reason I made that prediction was Mirantis, you know, was called out as a key partner in Nvidia's AI factory for government. And when I go read all the AI factory documentation, Nvidia's got a whole bunch of, you know, flavors and variations of how that can show up in various industries. And the only place where Mirantis shows up at least publicly right now from NVIDIA's perspective, is that is the AI factory for government. And that likely comes back to some of the, you know, capabilities that they have from, say, like a FedRAMP perspective or STIG or, you know, whatever it may be. And they've got a long history of serving this enterprise market and government customers, and they've got case studies of working with highly sensitive government agencies. But You know, that's why I think that could be a little clue, like Iron could have acquired those capabilities. And sometimes it's as simple as having employees that can walk into a government building. You know, they've got the credentials to do that. And probably nobody at Iron pre-Mirantis acquisition could even walk into some of these rooms sometimes in Washington, D.C. So maybe someone at Mirantis has that capability. You know, the way that Mike talked about it last week on this space didn't signal to me that the acquisition was for the orchestration capabilities and the software as a whole. He seemed, you know, I'd have to go back and listen to what he said. Maybe somebody remembers, but it seemed to be they acquired Mirantis for a quite specific reason. And I don't think we know what that is yet. Maybe it's this government angle. It could be, you know, their expertise with any of their customer base. They've got, you know, case studies with big pharma, big telecom, any of these spaces. Maybe it's just the fact that they have relationships with that customer base. They've got engineers and they've got customer support teams that have worked with these companies for a long time, and it just opens it up in general, but I interpreted Mike's comments as not being for the software necessarily itself. It seemed to be something more specific than that.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Let's take a pause here. And if you don't mind, we'll have NASDAQ had either a question or a comment. NASDAQ, good evening. NASDAQ, are you still there?

NASDAQ: Yep. Yeah. I am actually a holder of iron stock for a long time. But my bigger concern at this point is, I mean, what would be the next, you know, kind of a deal? I mean, how would iron sustain the stock price here, right? I mean, if there is not going to be any sort of a deal, if you're going to wait for a sovereign deal or something like that, that's going to take time. I don't think it's going to happen overnight. How is it going to sustain the stock price here?

₿itcoin ₿utcher: My answer to that is no one's more aware than myself or Franz that since Microsoft, with the exception of the NVIDIA managed service contract, that there were definitely expectations of more by now. What I would say though is I don't think you can say with certainty from your standpoint, while it's true that nothing's been signed minus the Nvidia deal that I just mentioned, like I don't think you have any reason to believe that they're not working on something in the background right now. And I think part of it too is what Mike was speaking to last week. If you're trying to integrate a new acquisition with Mirantis and you have new managed service capabilities that you potentially didn't have previously, or at least now you have more human capital that you can bring into a room and pitch better and/or actually use to install or integrate or the manpower to actually carry all this through, I would say they had so many things going on in the background prior to that with the Spain acquisition, the Mirantis acquisition, and then a groundbreaking deal with Nvidia in the background on getting, you know, 600,000 GPUs. Like they just haven't been, I don't think they were, the priority was to finish those necessarily, even though they were being worked on. So I expect something by, I expect more contracted ARR myself by August earnings. Hopefully we get something here in July. Ideally we don't go to the RAISE Summit as the keynote, or I should say the headline sponsor. It would be nice to, whether it's an extension of Horizon one through four to five and six with Microsoft, or if they're able to have a deal of material size at McKenzie or Childress that they can announce, I think that would help sentiment certainly in the space. But I also, I think my biggest question, if we have Dan on next time and they haven't signed it yet, I don't understand why Childress given the time to power narrative earlier in the year, why we're not retrofitting or prioritizing it right now. And I think the most likely answer is because Horizon 1 through 4 has been the emphasis, but I still think I think it just remains. I think the first domino that we're getting closer to, answer your question is, I think once they can deliver Horizon One in its entirety, which I think it's sooner than later based on our due diligence, mainly Franz's insights. then that I think as a Dan or Will, they can feel more confident because the the biggest thing with all this, Dan will always repeat, it's one thing to sign a deal, it's another to deliver it. You know, having the piece of paper essentially doesn't mean **** to him. It's more can we build it on time? And for a while, like self admittedly in his if we were to have him on, he would probably acknowledge, yeah, I thought Horizon one would go a little faster and there were problems with it for a variety of reasons. But if that is fixed now and if they can expect that two through four are on track, I think they can be more aggressive in selling and closing because then they can reallocate their labor at Childress to the retrofitting that I so deeply desire because Rubens are probably most likely going to be very hard to come by, and you're most likely going to allocate those Horizon 5 and 6 first, let alone Sweetwater. So the rest of Horizon, once you unplug those miners, I'd like to be filled up with B300 so that they can start generating operational cash flow and developing more enterprise relationships after the acquisition. with Mirantis. So I hope that it's not, it's not the answer to one deal that everyone wants. But I think like to say that they haven't been doing anything for the last three or four months, I don't think that's true either.

NASDAQ: Right. So one other question I have is, thanks for that answer though. One other question I have though is Canada, right? I mean, what's going on on Canada front? I mean, they should, they have been working on Canada for a while now. They have the GPUs. I don't know if they could be looking for a client for that site. Why haven't they? There's no absolutely no news on what's going on there though, right?

₿itcoin ₿utcher: So Prince George, God Particle confirmed that Prince George, the 24,000 GPUs or let's say 85 to 90% of them were sitting on the balance sheet as of last quarter, meaning They were on site, but they weren't fully installed and burnt in. So I would anticipate that you will see a fully installed Prince George at August earnings, which will certainly help the AI revenue number. The second piece of that is, and Franz can speak to it better, but it's hard to tell from the satellite imagery that he is taken what's being done necessarily at McKenzie, which is a head scratcher for us. But right now I don't have a better answer that and maybe Franz can. step in with and Canal Flats just appears to be an afterthought right now, given my guess is the scarcity of human capital to deploy at sites. And I would imagine that assuming Prince George got done, that everyone is headed to Mackenzie to in Canada to get that online sooner so that they can meet their targeted 3.7 billion ARR by December 31st calendar year.

NASDAQ: Yeah, thanks for that answer. I have one last question, which is, you know, someone recently, I think somebody credible published a report of, you know, different players, comparison of different players. I think core peer, I think software front, how Dell, HPE, Oracle, Corvio. NBIS and Iron Compare. I don't know if you got to see that report. It really didn't show well for Iron in there. Of course, I do understand Iron is new, but they also mentioned that included Mirantis as well. With the inclusion of Mirantis, the software capability for Iron was showing really poor. It was showing one on several fronts. maybe a couple of them had three. But NBIS, of course, was mostly two for most of them, but I believe others, HPE, Dell, and some others were sure much better. I think they were also comparing AWS and GCP and everyone else as well in there. But NBIS and CoreVI were much better off compared to Iron. If you saw the all the different parameters they were comparing by, like self-driving. I think they had several others out there. But yeah, I mean, why would Iron? I think, I don't know. I mean, Iron is still, of course, new on the software front, but wouldn't that look bad on Iron? I mean, how are they going to sign up clients if that's how everybody else sees it?

Blake: I mean, this is where I think, at least from my perspective, I did see that chart. I think it's a great breakdown of if you're going head-to-head NeoCloud competitors. But I think this comes back to, I believe, Iron's target market here is the Fortune 1000. And let's say you're showing up and selling to the... chief AI officer of Eli Lilly as a massive pharmaceutical company, and they're trying to figure out their AI strategy. I don't think that chart shows a fair comparison of what's being offered in that meeting to close the sale and build a multi-year partnership with that company. I think that's where the offering is the AI factory, and that conversation is very likely driven by Dell or NVIDIA themselves. And I feel a million times better going to NVIDIA's website and just reading through the documentation behind what's included in AI Factory because you see loads of software services and AI services. And, you know, they've thought through this deeply. But I think to me, Iron is just staying incredibly good at what they're good at. focused on the data center development and the energy side of this equation and allowing NVIDIA and Dell to fill the gaps. And if you believe that, you know, a whole bunch of AI factories can and will be sold over the coming years, and Iron is one of those trusted partners, then that's where I think the revenue flows from, flows from. But I, you know, it's not a head-to-head comparison in terms of like, that Chief AI Officer purchasing Iron or Nebius or Coreweave? And you can draw the comparisons to how Amazon and Microsoft and GCP have, you know, grown their businesses over the last few decades.

NASDAQ: Right. I personally, looking at everything to me, it feels like Iron is a very good acquisition candidate at this point for somebody like Dell or Nvidia. You know, maybe not. I mean, of course, you know, price, currently the price of Iron doesn't help, but, you know, had it been at $100 stock, had been $100 stock and if somebody were to offer a 200, it would probably make some sense. But the price it is currently, maybe there are interests, people are, I mean, Dell may be interested, Nvidia may be interested, but I don't see how Iron will give up, you know, at a lower price, like 100 or whatever, you know, I mean, and for Dell also, it wouldn't make sense to offer 200 when Iron is at 50 or even for Nvidia to offer something ridiculous like 200. But at the end of the day, if Iron gets 200 and And if they are able to get a few clients, then I feel it will be very attractive to somebody like Dell or Nvidia longer.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Yeah, I have to push back on that narrative for the, just think about if I was trying to sell my own business, then there's an incentive to make the financials look better. And right now they're front loading so much costs in personnel costs. Like they have the new hire this week with the former procurement specialist from Amazon and I believe Microsoft forgot the gentleman's name that we just hired. But I just every indication And that doesn't even include the super voting shares that Dan and Will have. So they would have to agree to that anyways. So I just respectfully don't find that relevant to this conversation. One, because of the voting shares that I just mentioned, but also everything that they're doing from a marketing perspective and trying to create global brand awareness, they're burning cash right now doing so, and they don't have the operational cash flow yet. So they are front loading all this with something bigger in mind. And to me, that doesn't bode well as an acquisition target yet. They have to build something further. But Franz wanted to comment, so everyone wants to hear him talk.

Frans Bakker: Yeah, I think the notion of Iron being an acquisition target is you know, kind of uninformed because there is just no way that they are going to agree on an acquisition. And that is simply for the fact that they're building a multi-decade business where, you know, it's a founder-led business. They are acquiring companies where founders of those companies are trading their life's work for full shares of iron. These guys are going to create something that is going to last 10, 15, 20 years. And I just think it's a waste of time to even talk about acquisition, simply for the fact that there's, they are in the early innings. I mean, this is not even the remotely the time to talk about acquiring Iron, let alone, it's basically impossible without the consent of the two people. that have founded this company and are convincing other people to join their story that's just starting right now. I mean, let's just close this topic right here and now because it's just a waste of time. Let's even talk about it. I hope that covers the question.

NASDAQ: Yeah, that answers it. One more speculative question I have is, Why wouldn't Iron acquire somebody like Solona or somebody who has like, seem to have like 4 gigawatts of power and they seem to be going after like different markets to acquire power so far from what I've seen? Why wouldn't like Solona?

₿itcoin ₿utcher: I'm sorry to interrupt, but I mean, it feels like that neglects the whole. No storm deal that was just closed in Spain, like, so there we have acquired power, not to mention there's plenty of power that hasn't been announced yet that is already in the background that. is most likely to be announced. So I, I don't think Iron has a power issue personally. I think they diversified into Europe and that's great. They diversified into Australia, into the APAC region. Like they have plenty to work with and this is more, I don't think for one second anyone in Iron is concerned about their power portfolio and if anything, they are focused on brand awareness and eventually monetizing it. So I, I appreciate your questions, NASDAQ, which is for the sake of everyone, I would like to go to Chase now. Chase, how are you tonight?

Chase: Hey, hey, I'm good. I'm good. No, I actually I came up here just because when I heard an acquisition target, I kind of got a little frustrated just because it just seems very short sighted to even have these discussions right now. I think as we all. We've all been in iron investors for a couple years now. And clearly, at least from my perspective, you know, if you're looking at a decade from now, it's at least a 500 billion or a trillion dollar company, just because the AI discussion's not going away. The different types of the compute are going to come online that we're not even aware about. And all of that, that entire discussion is just going to continue to be embedded into organizations that are going to continue to grow. So you want to have, you want to hold on to an asset that is, that has like, that has operational excellence and that's going to execute. So. I just feel like, on X, people are just, people need to sit down a little bit and just wait because the price is going to react. It just takes time. Like during the bear market over the last, what, two or three years, the price was doing nothing. It was bouncing up and down, going to 10, falling back down. It was awful. But then you had this exponential run and it touched 74 and everyone shows up and has an opinion. And that's cool. But the next time the price runs again, a lot of the people that are talking now are either going to sell. And that's just the name of the game. You're going to have more people that come in with similar ideas, just at a higher valuation. I've been listening to Franz and Bitcoin, I don't know, butcher for a couple of years now, at least, like, I don't know. You guys do this like every every week at this point. So I think people should just kind of like calm down a little bit, like sit on your hands and just have time in the market more than just a year or two, like think on five year increments. But that aside, I think what's also a little maybe if you guys could just help me wrap my head around it, I just don't understand the desire for like signing a deal right now. Like I feel like I see that on, I see a post every other day. And it just, I guess what the way I think about it, if you sign a deal, you're kind of like cutting off some of your capacity. I know it's nice to have that secure revenue, that secured revenue and maybe like a nice, like, I don't know, partnership associated with it, which of course will help the price, but if you're thinking long term and if you're expecting this AI discussion to expand over the next coming years, it seems like you might be capping some of your revenue opportunities. Like it might be better just to have a dynamic consumption business so that when you do have these, I guess, scarcities around compute, you can really monetize that revenue stream. I'm just kind of curious what you guys think about that or why you guys have a desire or why you think some people have a desire for deals?

₿itcoin ₿utcher: I'll hop in for a second and then Franz, feel free to follow up. I think any business is both forward-looking, but also The problem with our equity right now, and Mike spoke to this last week, they're working on ways to improve the cost of equity. Hint, hint, they plan to sell more shares in the future to fund all this infrastructure, which I'm cool with. I signed up for that ride. But part of that is being able to show that they can deliver and that we, I talked about Horizon one through four earlier and being able to deliver their first liquid cooled data center would dramatically de-risk the business and that would help rerate it. But secondly, I think specifically as it pertains to Childress in Canada, to the extent that they have these data centers that they already constructed and can monetize immediately before building or retrofitting or tearing down in the future for liquid cooled Rubin. If Rubin's not available and they're just sitting on these DCs and they pulled the miners when they could have a B300 and pay it back in two years, I just, I would want to understand from Dan like what he's holding out on because there's such a dramatic demand for inference in the marketplace right now. And if you can't get the Vera Rubin anyways, why not monetize what you have sooner than later and have a three or four year contract, which you asked then about dynamic pricing, which I'm assuming as opposed to contract, you're talking about spot rates because they tend to run a little higher. But I don't think that fits their business strategy because think of the Microsoft lease that everyone ******* about. Well, that lease did two things. The GB300s. through that rate are paid for after five years. So they don't have the risk of hardware and also the data center gets paid for. So it might not have the greatest NPV and every financial analyst can talk about it, but they still have a data center that has 20 years of life after and they can reallocate those GPUs or trade them in and they have a useful life after. So to answer your question, I think personally, Canada, we've already seen it. They've already committed next year to building air cooled. So I think it's just a timing thing in that they're already planning on doing these things and they haven't been able to do it yet because they have to deliver horizon one through four. But I think they can only build so much liquid cool capacity at once. And if you can. do if it's one or the other or you the hybrid approaches retrofitting at Childress while they're building Horizon five through six and or they have crews for Sweetwater building multiple sites in parallel. I just see it as an opportunity to increase cash flow and improve the reputation of the business, build enterprise relationships that can grow and ultimately you can pivot those customers into your future AI token factories. So that would be my answer, Chase.

Chase: Yeah, no, I think that's fair. I think it makes sense to probably have a mixture. I think that's probably the direction that they're all naturally going. I just see, I know maybe this is not a one-to-one parallel, but GitHub recently transitioned to a consumption business, and I think that's kind of just the direction of the market. And I know it's nice to have security within contracts for that baseline revenue growth and all the dynamics that you said where maybe like the data set it was paid for and so forth. But I don't know. Obviously, I'm not in the business and you guys know more than me, but it seems like the consumption dynamic revenues is the direction. Maybe you might want to have contracts around that, like, hey, consume, I don't know, $1 million of GPU for the year, and depending on the demand, it might fluctuate. So maybe there's a dynamic pricing within that contract. But I just think it's, I think you might be kneecapping the company just because you want to sign a deal in the short term. unless it's like a really good deal that has not been stated within the market yet. Then there's like upside surprise, and then you'd probably see an appreciation in stock price or something. But that's just my perspective. But yeah, thanks for sharing your perspective.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Franz, are you on stage still or you're away from the computer? Do you have anything to add?

Frans Bakker: No, I'm here. I'm just, you know, taking my sweet time to say something. For now, you know, your guests are taking the stage and I'm just sitting back and enjoying the show. I may get some popcorn in a bit. This keeps going. Now, I have, I honestly have not much to add to that. I had some things earlier when Blake was talking that I thought would be interesting to talk about, but kind of lost my train of thoughts there after we had NASDAQ and now Chase. It's all over the place. I did try to get more speakers on the stage, but it looks like no one took the microphone. my space is glitching again. Sometimes I don't see people that come up to speak. But yeah, so as for me, we are still doing a lot of research into Horizon One. So I don't know if you want to talk about that or I could talk a little bit about What I agree with from what Blake said is that I think a hyperscaler deals are financing levers. So I high level agree with that take. I think Aaron doesn't specifically want hyperscalers for the sake of profitability or, you know, rolling out their ambitions with Mirantis or otherwise targeting enterprises. I think, you know, they just need hyperscaler deals to be able to complete the circle. The story needs to keep going and they need there a few more of these names on the books in order to successfully roll out all their power. Unless, of course, there is this other story that, we've been talking about where Blake had a nice version of some kind of sovereign, project or global covering partnership. But outside of that, if we put that aside for a moment and we're just looking at Iron is trying to monetize multiple sites globally, I think they just need a few more hyperscaler deals, not necessarily gigawatt deals. I think, ideally you would sign maybe a Google, maybe an Anthropic. I know Anthropic is not a Mac 7, but maybe a few 100 megawatt for two more hyperscalers and one more Microsoft deal and then maybe a few hundred megawatts more divided over a couple of deals with Nvidia. And then that would satisfy, you know, your counterparties that you want to have on your portfolio as a, you know, Frontier Labs and Hyperscaler customers. And beyond that, it would be targeted at smaller companies or Fortune 500 or sovereign, like Blake said, it could be sovereign like government deals or it could be like sovereign enterprise contracts. I think that's the way we are going in the coming years. I think in a short order, everything is looking at Microsoft for Horizon 5 and 6 in the coming weeks or by the very latest, in my opinion, at or before earnings. I just don't see any other way around that. I think it would be extremely, insincere. I think that's the best word. I think it would be insincere of iron to destroy two blocks of mining buildings and just say we have no idea who is going to be the customer, right? I think that would just be purposely deceiving the market while you have an LOI signed with Microsoft. So I think they should just tell the market at the very least, we are destroying a half a billion dollars of CapEx that we built last year because we have someone that we're finalizing a contract with, right? I mean, that would not be the bad for your commercial abilities to sign a good deal. So I would be disappointed if they would just go on and fake a build it and they will come and then say, aha, we had Microsoft again. And then it turns out that they had this already for months and months planned, right? So with everything that's going on and all things considered with the stock price and how their communications have been year to date, I think they should be a little bit more open to the shareholders and just say what they're doing. because we all know the long-term plan and what their purpose is with DSX reference design with NVIDIA partnership. But just these simple things like connecting a few more thoughts to the shareholders, the same way that they are saying we expect the 50,000 B300s in the second-half of this year. I mean, I understand that initially they had no real shipping date, but they should be a bit more clear. Like we expect half of it or a part of it in the first half of the second-half, like the third quarter. It's just that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. There's a lot of clarity that they could provide to the market, which just makes this story a bit less, mysterious or opaque. So I think that's what I expect them to do. I expect them to be a bit more transparent with their, you know, what is the goal and the whole deal with the ad spending all over the world. I mean, we can keep on guessing and anticipating and trying to connect the dots ourselves, but it just doesn't really do well in a period of stock underperformance where the entire market is up and you're trying to play some kind of a slick, cool game where only a handful of institutions know what you're really doing. You see the stock being held by institutions that are not selling and somehow retail is is at the point of complete capital capitulation. I mean, it's just I will keep playing my part in telling the iron story, that's for sure. I've had a lot of accusations in the last week where people were trying to backtrack on things that I've said earlier this year that didn't come to fruition. Yes, of course, I don't always have the entire story correct, but directionally, I think I've been right more than many others that have claimed anthropic deals to be announced any day now and such things like that. So, yeah, I think the Going back to my expectation for the coming weeks, I think there are two things that I'm looking forward to. One is the delivery of Horizon One and the implications that it has. I think Iron announcing Horizon One will be a big relief for a lot of shareholders. I think at the same time, it will also be very good for the valuation of the company. I think money markets are looking at Horizon One currently as a non-cash producing asset. And as soon as it starts to be, you know, if they can deliver this to Microsoft, First of all, you take away the execution risk of the construction. And the direct implication of that is that the financial risk of this asset goes down. So that means it can go into a low yield or a low risk asset based financing product. So I think Iron is going to lever Horizon One as soon as it's delivered. So I think what we're going to see is You're going to see, on the one hand, that the execution risk gets priced out. And with that, the financing risk is being relieved. And it opens up a low-interest asset-backed product on top of the cash-producing asset. So it's like a double whammy. And I think that this is the long-term plan, what Iron's going to do with all their assets. And I think that's also why they are doing a mix of retrofitting and these higher CapEx liquid cooled data centers, because it's basically the opposite of the spectrum. The horizon types of buildings are so overly done for the current chip iteration that it looks almost like a waste of money, right? We're seeing 15 or $16 million a megawatt for GB300s that go at 291 per GPU hour. And then you're scratching your head like, why are they investing this much money into the data centers? Well, when the chips are not really worth that much on a first five-year cycle. But then you start to look at not only at the residual of the GPUs, but more so at the ability to finance the buildings. So like you could look at it as a mortgage. When they complete this building and hand it over to Microsoft, you have a triple-A rated tenant. that is producing, that is paying the bill for these buildings that are producing the cash and that you bring that to the money markets where they are going to say, okay, this is one of the best types of assets that you could possibly finance and you get a super low interest rate on these. And Yeah, that's why they can't bring a retrofitted mining building to the same company. They will say, yeah, look, this is, it works. It's great for you, but it's not worth our time to give you a finance on top of these retrofitted buildings. So that's why I think Iron is opting for a mix between these very high end of the spectrum. the $15 million a megawatt liquid cooled data centers and the low end of the spectrum where they just go for quick cash flows out of the GPUs. So I think this is what we're going to see from Iron going forward. It's going to be very balanced. And that's the same with the debt to equity. That's the same with their portfolio of customers, you know, the mix between hypers and non-hypers. And the same way with their CapEx on a MW basis. So the high end is the liquid cooled and the low end is the air cooled. And honestly, my current Intel says that they are going to do this in Sweetwater as well. So yes, I know that they have announced to the market they're going to build only a DSX, a liquid cooled data center next year for 200 MW IT load. as a reference design or flagship, whatever, for Vera Rubin. But I also see them currently doing something entirely else on a different part of the site where it looks more like air cooled data centers, simply for the fact that there's not enough space to build liquid cooled liquid cooling plants there. So Everyone that's screaming when deal is just only zooming in on a small part of what Iron's really doing here. I think we should start to look at this as an operation that is multifaceted. And that's why the market didn't celebrate the GPU financing with the investment grade rating and everything, because that was that that's only the GPUs. And if the building is not ready, that means the execution risk of the building is still being priced into the GPUs as well. So it's not a, you don't see a relieving rally on the GPUs only because the GPUs don't produce any cash without a building that's de-risked. So everyone and their dog should be looking at Horizon 1 to be finished and handed over because the pricing out that execution risk of that building is going to open the, it's going to open the floodgates of institutional money pouring in that sees, okay, now they have, now they're validated by Microsoft as a builder, not only as a deal maker. And when the builder is starting to, you know, deliver buildings and produce cash, the GPUs being financed at that low rate is also going to, weigh in a lot more heavy. So yeah, the order of business looks weird, but this goes back to my initial, my initial story where I talked about puzzle pieces that are put into place but are not connecting yet. The delivery of Horizon One is one of those connecting centerpiece of puzzle pieces that is going to be put into place. And then you're going to see it clicks on the left with the GPUs, on the right with the financing, and on the top with the commercial negotiations that they are having. And on the bottom with the new the rolling off of the old contracts and the recontracting of those existing GPUs. So you see that these things independently of each other don't mean anything without the centerpiece that's connecting them all and it's the delivery of Horizon. So when deal is a waste of time because you're going to look at when Horizon delivery. This is where what it's at. And okay, I know I sound like I'm predicting a massive boost in a stock price, which obviously the people that want Iron to go down are probably listening as well and are going to say, oh, let's **** them over. And when they announce Horizon 1, we're going to go short or something. You know, Jane Street has their spies everywhere. I know it sounds conspiracy-ish, but I just don't want to get people's hopes up because the stock price of iron is still a iffy factor despite the puzzle pieces that I just talked about. So just don't take it as financial advice. But I do honestly think that we're going to be worthy of a re-rating. And if the market works as the market should work, then delivery of Horizon One as a first out of the four should be a increase in valuation of the equity. That's just, in my opinion, I don't see any other way around that because this is the de-risking event that we are craving for as iron shareholders. That's just, I'll just pause there, but that's what I think we should be looking at and not the when deal thing.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Let's go to Brian. And Brian, probably along with closing thoughts. Brian, good evening.

Brian: Hey guys, how you doing tonight?

₿itcoin ₿utcher: It's my first unofficial Father's Day. I think I qualify my wife's expecting in September. So I stood up today when they asked for the father's in mass. So I think I qualify, so it was a good day. But yeah, other than that, just another Sunday night space.

Brian: Well, love that for you and wishing you and your family all the best through the final throes of having your first and happy Father's Day to all the fathers out there. I guess every day is technically a Father's and Mother's Day if we're thinking about it from an intellectually honest lens. I guess I would just take this back to a conversation much more around the kind of strategic direction of IRAN. I mean, I have full faith and confidence that management team and the board are going to focus on creating shareholder value. I think Alfred always says it very well that there are certain IRAN peers that are just better storytellers, but they may not execute. And I believe that this management team will execute. But the key for me, at least as a multi-year shareholder, right, is thinking about, you know, the glide path. And, you know, the glide path is, yes, it comes down to execution, you know, high margin defensible revenue growth, right? How do you diversify the revenues? So, you know, you've got multiple hyperscalers or sovereigns or whatever they may be. that are showing up, driving that high margin revenues. But then also, how do you really go from being a micro-cap to a mid-cap to a true mid-cap on a glide path to a large cap stock? And part of that's going to be improving the cost of capital. And with that becomes continuing to high grade the shareholder base, lowering the volatility, telling the story more effectively, obviously doing deals. and then executing on them. And I think that if you read the tea leaves here between what they've got with Microsoft, Nvidia, Dell, I mean, they're clearly, yeah, they didn't get the slide Nebia has got. And for full disclosure, I'm also a Nebia shareholder, but yeah, they didn't get the same single slide that Nebia has got. But That doesn't mean a year from now that they don't get that. And so for me, at least, the way I think about the company is really how they're telling the story to that incremental institutional investor, that mutual fund, that long only, right, that's going to help lower the volatility of the stock and help ultimately improve the shareholder base and the cost of capital. What I'd really like to see is that, you know, it's not the disparate press releases of information, which are great, right? I mean, transparency is wonderful, but it's really how do you thread the needle between, you know, what these various acquisitions or build outs, you know, or deals globally now, you know, mean, because ultimately you've got to continue to get the stock price up if you're going to, you know, want to continue to, you know, issue equity, which you need to continue to drive growth. And obviously the stock has done well on a trailing 12 month basis. Great. You know, and investing is always relative, right? So the relative share price performance on a, you know, trailing six, seven month basis hasn't been the best of the peer group, but we can't be shortsighted about it. And so I really think the key to rerating the stock is obviously the things I said prior, but also just continuing to tell the story more effectively to those institutional incremental shareholders. And I think it's incumbent upon management as they continue to high grade various components of the company to continue to do that. as well. And so I would just leave it there. Happy shareholder, obviously want the stock to continue to perform well and outperform, but that's the lens with which I'm looking through it at this time as a patient long-term investor.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: It's a good way to end it, Brian. I appreciate you coming up. I appreciate everyone's time tonight. We always it's always a lot easier to come up here with a new scoop or a new headline. But some of this is just understanding what's in front of us. Shout out to God Particle had a good breakdown that we had touched on the just if you look at what they plan on building next year, what they committed to building, you know, over a gigawatt of contracted and installed power that's going to produce most likely in excess of 13, $14 billion ARR. And today we're, you know, a fraction of that like that. It's just time in this market and I'm sure our patients will be rewarded. But I personally Not for lack of, I'd love to make a great price prediction, but the problem is I don't know what the hell they're going to do. Like I have an idea, but there's so many moving variables right now until they give us a little more clarity. I would just assume enjoy the ride and just know that especially right now, if Jensen has this call option, to buy iron at 70 in the future, I think it's fair to say that buying under 70, you're going to be okay long term, not financial advice. But, you know, I'm always trying to grow my sack and DCA a little more, but this is more about where iron's going in the next year, two, three, four, five years, not two, three days. It took me a while to understand that and having almost lost everything. I appreciate owning it more, even if it's frustrating day-to-day. Sometimes I know I'm in a win. I just don't know when, but I'm okay with waiting. So I'll leave it at that. Franz, thanks, Brian. Appreciate you. Blake, you're welcome anytime. And I look forward to hearing from everyone. This week, it appears that, you know, the macro may or may not be rocky with Iran and the US. Great. More of the same of kind of numb to it at this point. Doesn't really matter. We still have a lot of power and a power shortage, and we have some new software integration services that we can sell to the market. So when they choose to do that, You guys will be the first to know if I find out. Have a great night, everyone.