IT IS EARLY. AI SUPER-CYCLE.

Hosted by @Small Cap Snipa · 2026-04-14 · Tags: IREN, NUAI

TLDR

The speakers argued that surging AI inference, enterprise adoption, and hyperscaler spending are driving an early-stage infrastructure supercycle centered on compute, GPUs, land, and power. They compared NeoCloud and colocation economics, examined CoreWeave, Nebius, IREN, Cipher, TeraWulf, and CleanSpark, and emphasized that execution, financing, profitability, and timely access to power remain decisive risks.

Speakers

Notable quotes

Transcript

₿itcoin ₿utcher: The.

Small Cap Snipa: Google. All righty. Welcome to X Spaces. It is great to be back here with you guys. Had to get a little hype with the music. Got away from the X Music, this space. Just being that the market looks like it's back. What a last week, week and a half. So shipping up to Boston, it's only right. Let's get right into it. So I want to really just talk about AI tonight, just in general, outside of just like IRAN, CoreWeave, NetNebius, and what we're seeing within the NeoClouds, just kind of like the acceleration that we've seen from the hyperscalers as well. And then I'll go on a little spiel, and then we'll start inviting some people up. I hope Bitcoin AI guy comes up, because I got to give him his I got to give him some credit where credit is due regarding our spaces that we had, I believe it was earlier last week, and then just his tweets over the last couple of weeks regarding the cycle of staying bullish, et cetera. So it seems as if the Iran war is-- tensions have died down a little bit, but it's important to know that things are still It's still a headline-driven market. At any given time, we can get escalation overseas in the Middle East. Now, there's talks-- the Pentagon was talking a little bit about making their move on Cuba. So you never know what's going to happen. I was reading something this morning about how the US and Iran were trying to get another-- an extra two weeks on the ceasefire. But nonetheless, the market has completely just-- it's acting as if the war never happened. And we're right back to where we were previously. And I mean, the S&P made a new meter date high, a new all time high today, I believe so. But anyways, you know, if everyone here, I assume, is pretty well tuned in to the AI infrastructure play, the actual picks and shovels that are really printing money right now, land, power, gigawatts, the hyperscalers, the neo clouds, everyone racing. you know, to lock it all down before the next wave hits like a freight train, which I think that we've seen and are starting to see over the last few weeks. If you just kick it off, you know, last week we spoke about the Nibius and Meta deal. We spoke about the Coreweave and Meta deal. And I believe just a day or two after the space, Coreweave, again, lit the market on fire with Anthropic. Coreweave and Anthropic last week, April 10th, multi-year agreement. Coreweave is going to give Anthropic that the cloud computing capacity that they need to basically run the entire Claude family at like a full production scale, it looks like. So Nvidia GPUs, Nvidia accelerators across Coreweave's United States footprint, which, and obviously, Nvidia, the real deal. inference training, the workloads that are exploding right now, I believe with some Vera Rubin architecture as well. So I was watching Michael Intrador, whatever his last name is, the CEO of Coreweave, last week on CNBC. He referred to it, although there's not full numbers out and clear exact transparency on what the deal is. We know it's gigawatt scale, and we know it's a multi-billion dollar contract. The compute is going to start later this year. It's going to ramp hard, is what he said. You know, it's interesting. Cori's footprint, they have a large footprint. You know, it doesn't you know, it gets talked about, but specifically, you know, they're operating like over 40 data centers in the U.S. right now. I believe it's 40, 45. They're active over like almost a quarter of a million GPUs, maybe a little bit more and over three gigawatts. of contracted power. But obviously, if you have three gigawatts of contracted power, 43 active data centers, the average is less than 100 megawatts per. So it's not like an insane scale at a singular site. They kind of have like a homogenous approach to it. They're like scattered all across the country, different sites, not massive scale. in one area, which I guess is good to some extent. Some of these providers and hyperscalers in general, they don't want to mix generations, mix architecture at a single site. And that's why that was a big reason why OpenAI walked in the Stargate expansion. Obviously, there was a delay, but the delay was going to cause the Blackwells, the GB300s to be out of date at the time that the data center would come live and operating. But at the same time, it's more of like a, it's a cleaner, it's a neater approach, not mixing generations, not mixing architecture. So I think it makes sense. I think it's a smart move. But nonetheless, they clearly have the hardware and the energy pipeline locked in. But what a lot of people are speculating, not just like us on X, but the analysts, two big guys are, can they deliver it on time and cost effectively? And that's basically just the theme. that we're seeing, not just with Corweave, but every single company that's providing compute, along with the hyperscalers that are securing land and power just for themselves, for their own, say, like home base operations, and even the private providers and data center, you know, moguls, the end scales of the world, they're all, that's the theme, right? Can they get it on time? But also cost-effectively, too. So the build-out, it's really, really accelerating, man. It's moving so fast that we all know the power is the bottleneck, Lance, the bottleneck supply chain, or new bottlenecks. But again, I'm watching whether CoreWeave executes without blowing their timelines and margins. And I wouldn't be surprised. We saw yesterday, TerraWolf, they took advantage of an offering at a very friendly price, 800 million with a-- I believe it's not-- it's 900 million, possibly. It was 800 million with like $120 million option. And I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing a lot of companies in the sector doing the same thing, taking advantage of these prices. to raise capital efficiently. So on the funding side, though, it's wishwashy with Corwi, but they're still stacked. They have a backlog of over 60 billion. They got that fresh $20 billion expansion with Meta, talked about it last week. It's through 2032. And Wall Street is guiding like 12 to 13 billion in revenue this year. It's kind of insane scale. that Coral Reef has been able to achieve, just being that they went public last year. But clearly, markets pricing and that they're a big, I don't want to say essential, but a really big landlord for AI. The Anthropic win, they got 9 out of 10, 9 out of the top 10 AI model makers now running on their platform. So it definitely proves the model. Something else just to note outside of the cloud, the neo cloud, outside of what a lot of us are invested in, what we look at every day, segue into what I was talking about, the hyperscalers, they're not waiting around. They're buying immense amounts of land, locking in the energy. And they're really like 2026 is-- maybe Q1 wasn't so much of it, but Q2, the second-half, moving forward, they're They're taking over projects to secure their future build-outs. So we talked a little last week, Microsoft, or a few weeks ago, like last month, they took over parts of OpenAI's Stargate project, the expansion project in Texas. I think it's like 700 or 900 megawatts, whatever it is, in Abilene that Oracle and OpenAI walked away from. Now they're building two brand new AI factory buildings and an on-site power plant. right next to the main Stargate campus. This, like, this is new within the last two weeks. And then this week, they did it again. Yesterday or two days ago, they're taking over OpenAI Stargate in Norway. This didn't surprise me too much. OpenAI announced like a month ago after walking from Stargate expansion that they are having a new leadership change, a new strategy change to really target the enterprise, enterprise AI, heat up the race with Anthropic, because Anthropic is clearly running away. They're getting 72% of new enterprise clients are choosing Anthropic over OpenAI. So they do this leadership change, they drop Sora, Disney contract, a $3 billion deal, whatever it was, is done. They're focusing on enterprise and they announce how they are in the interim looking to rent servers, cloud capacity, racks from third-party cloud providers rather than building their own, which makes a ton of sense. The company was on track to burn like half a billion dollars by, or excuse me, half a trillion dollars, $500 billion by either 2030 or 2035. Even if it's 2035, that's still insane. And this isn't just burn. Like this is OpenAI in the red, half a trillion dollars. So they need to get compute online. Clearly, it's not working as as easily as they thought it would. So I think this is the right move. So when I say I wasn't surprised that they dropped the Stargate in Norway either, that's what I mean by that. So Microsoft did it. They took over the site. It was going to be the flagship European, one of the flagship, I think originally it was the flagship European site for OpenAI. They were looking to do something in the UK. The sites I think it's going to give Microsoft like 250 megawatts to start, expand it up to 500, so half a gigawatt. They want 100,000, I'm reading here, 100,000 Nvidia GPUs by the end of 2026, all renewable hydropower. And they are renting the capacity and adding 30,000 next-gen Vera Rubin chips, I believe, through N scales. So they're not just partnering anymore. They're taking over the wheel. And if you go overseas, Microsoft, $10 billion commitment in Japan from now till 2029, right into AI infrastructure, data centers, cybersecurity software, training a million engineers probably. So SoftBank has a lot to do with this. Local players are getting involved as well to just kind of keep that sensitive data in the country, in the region that they're scaling and also scaling Azure because The last, the issue with Microsoft's last earnings that we all saw was that the Azure growth was decelerated a little bit. So it's just looking like global energy and land warfare. And Google's not sitting either. I posted something last week. They have, they are doing like a $15 billion build out for a data center in India, mega hub that ground is groundbreaking like this month, end of April. So that's in two weeks. It's a full gigawatt site. They secured the land already. It's a cluster among three different campuses. It's the biggest foreign investment, like direct foreign investment in the history of India. So this is a big deal over there. They're betting that India can become Asia's AI backbone, despite-- I'm not-- never mind, I'm not going to say anything else on that. Again, I think that this build-out and this CapEx spend so early this year is fueling some of the valuations we're seeing upstream. So what, two months ago, three months ago, Anthropic had a series funding, and the valuation was at $380 billion, and investors are now like Anthropic is now getting offers from investors that value it up to $800 billion. I saw something on Bloomberg. So 380 to 800 billion, nearly a trillion. It's double, more than double that valuation from a couple of months ago in February. Their annualized revenue run rate is already north of 30 billion, which wasn't expected at all in 2025. And markets just pricing in that. They're pricing in that AI really needs a model layer, and we need to compute yesterday. Now, I see Bitcoin Butcher just requested. I'm going to let him come up as we segue into iron. Speaking this momentum wave, of course, we got to get to iron. So stock's up, what, a little bit over 50% from Lowe's, just about 50% in the last couple of weeks, week and a half ago. We're definitely riding the momentum of the acceleration in the NeoCloud, the AI infrastructure space. The core, we've anthropic vehicle, we've meta, Nibius meta, plus just the supercycle in general. So don't even need to repeat myself that hyperscalers are spending and just really trying to expand aggressively. So a 4 1/2 gigawatt you know, not pipeline, just secured portfolio is attractive, but better yet, Sweetwater is energizing this month. And I think that the market is just starting to come to terms with that, especially as a lagger so far this year. A lot of noise with funding, dilution, the execution risk. But also just the fact that we're seeing the deals now, hey, it's three pretty large deals in the last month, and 1.4 is coming online very soon, supposed to this month. So clearly, we're seeing some immense value that for a hyperscale-like deal to the likes of an Anthropic or a Google, even an OpenAI, who knows, the All-In podcast at GTC is OpenAI preferred partner. I believe the response was can't speak on that, even in Meta as well. So really, I mean, I think all of them fit. The main conversation, again, is just execution. We spoke about it last week. Can they deliver-- I mean, they're going to be able to deliver SweetWater One. I definitely believe that. It's the funding side, and it's warranted the worries, right? Everyone's worried about an at-the-market offering, $6 billion. It's half of the market cap at the time, right? and it's replacing the prior billion-dollar one from last year. But if you get specific on the funding, right, they're around a billion and a half, $1.2 billion company. They had that original $1 billion ATM, fully tapped it, sold like 60 million shares, 65 million shares, whatever it was to raise it for the build-out. It was the right size at the right time, and they executed. So look, we're where things are now in an environment that is way more CapEx heavy, way more proof of work, proof of concept, right? Like GPUs are being plugged in all across the country with, you know, across all operators, whether you're a neocloud or a hyperscaler, et cetera. So, you know, I think that this is kind of just like a scaled up. I mean, obviously it's scaled up. if it can be flexible, sold gradually through a syndicate of big banks, it's going to be a big win. And I believe that the stock price where we are currently, I can't say exactly, but I believe where we are currently right now is around the same price of when the announcement came out originally back in the beginning of March, I believe it was, right, with the scaling up to 150,000 GPUs. So listen, this is the working capital for the AI pivot. It's a long trade. I still believe it's got a few years of legs behind it. And this is the tool to fuel growth without blowing out the balance sheet. And we saw some more, like I said earlier this week, yesterday, with TerraWolf. I believe Hive Digital announced an offering today as well. It's just, this is the nature of the business in an extremely capital, whether it's capital constraint or just an extremely capital intensive business and environment. So the market freaked out the first time over the dilution fears and it's granted, it's worthy, but the reality is this is exactly how the company funded the last leg of growth when they were smaller and it worked. looking back at the price action over the last year, year and a half. So bottom line, whether it is neoclouds like Coreweave executing on gigawatt deals with Anthropic, the hyperscalers, Microsoft, Google, the guys that we talked about, they're securing land and energy worldwide, or now Iron's starting to catch the tailwind of this momentum, this super psycho with what is clearly real power and infrastructure and what we all hope to be smart funding, this layer of AI, the infrastructure layer, the five layer cake that Jensen talks about all the time is where the capital is flowing. So it's not, again, it's not speculation. We all know that it's happening in real time this month, even this week. So I'm going to open it up now, see if we can get some speakers on here. Please feel free to request. And without a doubt, we will go to my friend Bitcoin butcher. How are you, my man? How was Easter for the shop?

₿itcoin ₿utcher: We did pretty well. Easter, my clientele tends to just, you know, traditional items or hams or lamb or, but kind of where we're at in the inner city, people tend to just end up buying what they want to eat. So it might be ribs, steaks, oxtails, whatever. So good holiday for us. But I thought I would come out tonight to support you because you've been a great advocate for our community and wanted to show support. So thank you for having me up. Some of the topics that you touched on that I thought I could add some detail to, or at least how I view them. With respect to Anthropic, I was looking up while you were speaking their run rate. ARR at the beginning of 2025 was $1 billion and at the end of 2025 it grew to 9 billion and now it's at 30 billion. So the obvious question is with open AI's pivot and more, you know, they're leaning down, getting rid of Sora as you spoke to and trying to focus in on what appears to be enterprise. The enterprise leader right now is Anthropic. So it's honestly, where is Anthropic going? And you've seen the most recent deals. I think what's very telling, there's, I think Marbles is in here. I saw him, but he had spoken about on one of our spaces about there's two things going on. the enterprise side, you have Anthropic now changing how they used to just have a flat subscription fee. and they still have that for Claude. But now, given that you have these high token users in place at some of these companies, they're turning their business model into pay as you go and pay per token. So I think that lends itself well to the Neo clouds in this environment as opposed to a co-location player, because you're in an environment where compute is becoming more synonymous with intelligence and to the extent that you log into Claude right now or any other AI of your choice and it's stalling because it doesn't have enough compute, that means it needs more power and more tokens to produce the desired intelligence to fulfill the respective needs. So I think that sets up well for Neo Clouds. One thing I would push back on with smaller sites We've seen in parallel industries, you were speaking to Coreweave, which I can understand having distributed sites and given the expansion of inference as a function as opposed to training in AI. So it's good to be geographically diverse so that you serve those markets. But I would say having a larger site actually can be beneficial in its own right with respect to training because you can have larger training clusters, meaning you have more GPUs paired together, which can produce more beneficial models for whatever it is they're trying to create. So they kind of play off of each other. And I would also say when you have a larger site, there's fewer potential power to draw for that reason. So your capacity and your ability to provide those inference services is limited with a smaller site, even if it is less power intensive than training. Some of the earnings we were looking at this week, Bitcoin Mining AI Guy had mentioned it, and one of them came out today was ASML. Those who aren't familiar with ASML, they're a European company that produces the machinery used by TSM, and TSM is Taiwanese Semiconductor. The reason these two are important is the key constraint in the industry right now, at least for Iron specifically, the reason why they haven't been able to scale at this point in time is the delivery of GPUs. And the reason why GPUs aren't being produced fast enough is there's been a production problem due to the limit, or I should say the scarce amount of high bandwidth memory that's available. So we don't have information yet on the high bandwidth memory providers. Those are three companies, Samsung, Micron, and then there's one other that's escaping me at the moment. But I would say today seeing ASML speaking to large orders and good earnings means that TSM is ordering those machines from them, which we'll most likely see tomorrow, which means Nvidia is ordering more GPUs from TSM to fabricate, which means they've been able to source enough high bandwidth memory. So those were just a few initial thoughts that I had. If there's anything that I said that you want clarification on, feel free, but Definitely an exciting time in the industry. Again, I would emphasize I have co-location exposure via Cipher and potentially NU AI if they're able to sign a deal in the future, but those are a way smaller percentage of my portfolio compared to Iron and then certainly Nevius and Core Reeve play in the NeoCloud space. But again, I think the reason it's advantageous to be in the Neo Clouds as opposed to the co-location providers is the returns on the machinery right now, given the growth in the token prices, you're able to use older generations. So like an A100 right now that came out more than five years ago is you're able to price the token the same that you were in year one, which usually there's a decay factor and it loses value over time. So good time to be a neo-cloud, and I think that's why you're seeing more aggressive ordering by some of these neo-clouds. And one last thought, I think why Iron had success in Bitcoin mining was this idea of the late mover advantage, where they're early enough in Bitcoin mining where they weren't necessarily the last ones in, but they were later in the CapEx cycle where they were able to have the newest machinery, which is why I think right now as a NeoCloud, they're going to catch people by surprise because Nebius and Coreweave have been doing this a little longer. So it's fair to say they're more experienced, but Coreweave specifically has a lot of hoppers, which are the H100 and H200 chips. So they have to replenish all those at some point, whereas the chips that Iron's buying right now are later generations like B300s, GB300s, and ultimately Vera Rubin. So those were just a few thoughts that I wrote down while you were speaking. Small cap, I appreciate you having me up, but I just wanted to fill some time to add some color to the conversation and it's a good time to be in the industry. And it's exciting because this is something that a lot of us have been looking at for more than 18 months and it's starting to finally play out the way we thought it would. It just sucks sometimes when it was, you know, like last April or even a month or two or even a few weeks ago, we could argue. But When the chips start to come together, it's a fun place to be a part of. So thanks again for having me.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, totally. And I appreciate you coming up and adding some color, specifically the Anthropic segment as far as the pay as you go now. I think that definitely adds-- I mean, it adds color to the whole industry, and it's very positive. in the space. So if we could just expand on it a little bit more, and I'll sum it up for dummies, I guess, in the best way possible that I think. So when you say how this is even-- just add some bullish momentum to the sector, the NeoCloud, the providers, it is-- and I've seen the anthropic API keys and how it's been previously, and I even have like agentic frameworks on OpenClaw. And, they basically pulled the plug on the all-you-can-eat model, right, for some of the heavier users, especially when we talk about the agents and OpenClaw, that basically like Pro and Max users can not burn through their flat monthly limits on the autonomous setups. And so So now it's like, Anthropic is basically saying, go as much claude as you want, pay as you go, pay for every token, right? And that demand is going to flow straight downstream. It's the cloud providers, the data centers, and the power guys who deliver the GPUs and the gigawatts, right? Because the old flat fee model, you can kind of say that it was like subsidizing usage and putting I don't want to say a cap, but somewhat of like a soft cap on how much people could actually run if it, if I'm, if that's correct. But now it seems like the brakes are off, right? Companies, developers, not that you couldn't spin up, you know, unlimited agents, but now you really can and automate the workflow 24/7 and scale inference without hitting the wall. So yeah, please chime in, Butcher.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Yeah, if Marbles is available and wants to come up this week, he actually works with, I'm not sure if he's using actual tokens, but another piece we had spoken about. So there's the company side where you had talked about, if you go to a restaurant, you have the all you can eat buffet, which is maybe the current model. And then the newer model is ordering plates as you go. You know, if you were at the sushi restaurant and putting each dish on and they add it up. And certainly there's not a fixed amount and you're going to have a certain bill depending on how much you use it. So there's two points to it. One, it's if you're using more as a company, you have to pay more for those services. That's one piece. But in attracting talent now, the second part of it, which Marvels had spoken to and I'm sure there's other people who want, if they want to come up who work in the industry. But what I find more revealing is part of the negotiation process with very high talented AI driven individuals is they're walking into a new job and asking their future employer, well, what's my token budget? 'cause they're essentially saying like, I can only create so much unless if you guys give me the ability to use the tools that are provided to me, otherwise I'm not in a position to succeed and I can't help your company. So I think that's another dynamic where it's even more important. There's two pieces to it. There's having the capacity to, compute, but also just get to market faster. And I think that's another piece of this where I think the hyperscalers are spread so wide right now where they have teams, they obviously can put together DCs, but there is a value proposition to good bare metal providers where the difference being, again, co-location is it's an empty data center than the hyperscaler. buys the GPUs, installs them, runs them on their own, and essentially, you know, a cipher or a wolf is just kind of the landlord. Whereas the tokens we were speaking about earlier, if you do business with Core Weave, Iron, or Nedius, they might team up with Perspective Hyperscaler, whether it's Iron with Microsoft, and provide the GPUs, and then Microsoft can layer their software on top and their proprietary programming and then interact with their clients through Azure. But it's just telling to me that Jensen has been so ahead of everyone in this where sometimes it feels like you're reading a sci-fi. novel or watching a sci-fi movie when he's up during one of his speeches. But for the longest time, he spoke to AI's factories, and now you're going to see these high token output factories that whoever can do it the most efficiently can produce the most tokens, they can produce the most intelligence. So in theory, they should be producing the most revenue for the ultimate end user. So Just a crazy time. And it's really cool to see it evolve. And it just anytime Jensen speaks, you should be listening because he's probably six months to 12 months ahead of it because he's the one who's ultimately designing the world's leading chips.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, totally. He was on a really interesting podcast with I'm sure you saw some of the clips, Darwish or however you pronounce his name, Darwish Patel. And there's that clip of him, going around of basically him talking about how he's funded the ecosystem and built out the ecosystem regarding like the core weaves and Nebius and N scale and how basically they wouldn't be where they are today without his capital investment and his deployment. And he said something that was really interesting. It's like, man, I can't, I can't recite it perfectly, but he was basically saying that You know, is it the ideal business model? No, but we're gonna do what we have to do with the least amount of work, right? And that's him giving Coreweave the ability, right, to be a preferred partner and build out in a way that they have. And the same thing with Nscale, the same thing with Nibia so far. So I'm wondering, Butcher, what did you think about just kind of what's transpired in the last couple of weeks regarding those two, you know, really starting to secure and accelerate so far in this quarter, just the beginning of this year. You know, a lot of people, there's some big skeptics, and it seems as if people, you know, people were talking about how the race is over, right, with regards to Nibias and Coreweave and Iren talking about, you know, the big three in the cloud space. We saw, you know, I won't speak any names, but people talking, you know, that the race is over. And obviously, you know, we know that it's not. We don't believe that it is. It's just everyone has their time. So I'm wondering what you thought about. I mean, I'm sure that you know that Anthropic is spending $50 billion on compute and they need I don't remember how many gigawatts secure that they need over the next, you know, three to five years, but I believe like their target is 50. So just speaking about, you know, the sheer volume that they're producing right now, their capital investment, you know, do you see them as possibly continuing to secure, whether it's co-location or, you know, it's looking like it's preferably cloud. Kind of just, I'd love to hear your mindset on what you were thinking over the last couple of weeks, seeing these things develop.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: I think they're going to lean into bare metal, or excuse me, not bare metal, but potentially with, so they signed deals with Coreweave and Nebius, which is confirmed, which shows I think they have a scaling problem in the sense that they went from 1 billion to 30 billion, and I don't think they have 30 times the people or 30 times the capacity. I mean, it's a scalable model, but they're still having bottlenecks via the user experience. We specifically, as Iron in due diligence, through our studying, you see Dan had spoken to, whether it was a government or whether it was Anthropic, there was a specific client mentioned on the prior earnings requiring a software solution. And one potential theory behind that is if Anthropic is so busy with their human capital developing new enterprise software that you know, name a day and they're destroying a new industry, whether it's cyber security or they have an Excel add-on that's going to eliminate investment bankers. But I think they're primarily focused on their models as opposed to the infrastructure itself. And the second piece of that is there is software in the sense that There's this open source software called Kubernetes. And for all the tech people on here, I apologize in advance, but I think most people just want a high level overview. But think of Kubernetes as a program that manages all of your respective models and helps deploy them and allocate resources at the data center level. Now, IRIN has that in-house capability. I'm almost positive Coreweave and Nevius do. So that's something where some of these larger enterprises, rather than having an infrastructure team on site, they can deploy their human capital to their actual business model. It's possible in the future that Anthropic grows and Maybe they want to get more vertically integrated and operate at a data center level. But for now, the evidence suggests that they're using these Neo Clouds with a Kubernetes add-on in order to facilitate their operations. The only thing I would say about the race with Coreweave and Nedius is they're running pretty hot right now, which is It helps iron in the sense that it just shows that there's this value lagging and there's this catch-up trade opportunity, but it also, it's going to make it more revealing at earnings to me when Coreweave and Nebius, their average data center lease, or like there was a, attachment from FluidStack's IPO documents showing that they pay FluidStack being associated. I think they're based out of England, but they're in NeoCloud. They're associated with Google and they do some of these services for companies like Anthropic, but they're they have to pay a colocation fee to their co-location provider, which in the FluidStack example was Wolf. Well, if the data center is averaging, let's say 10 million in revenue a MW, but you're paying out 1.5 to 2.0 million right now, which is probably closer to two in the current marketplace, 15 or 20% of your revenue off the top is going to something that you don't get a return on. Now, you don't have to build the infrastructure, and there's capital requirements associated with that. But I do think once Iron's able to scale up in Canada and Childress specifically with their air-cooled data centers, they're going to show that they're more profitable. They've shown a profit in the past, specifically as it related to Bitcoin mining, and they've showed high margins in Canada for their cloud. More recently, there's been a little noise related to their convertible bonds, but I don't know if it's going to be this quarter. It's most likely going to be the next quarter in August. I think you're going to see Iron stick a flag into the neo-cloud industry and make a distinction in profitability, or at least that's our working thesis behind our investment. Whereas Nevius and Coreweave have already shown the ability to generate billions of dollars in annual recurring revenue, but every time you get to earnings, it shows that they're showing a gap loss. So they would argue it's a scaling problem and that they have all these fixed costs and that as they grow bigger, they're going to generate more gross margin that can be allocated to those fixed costs. but I haven't seen it yet. And I've also kind of, I don't bother having the conversation with them half the time because there's no credible information beyond quarterly earnings to assess their progress. Like if you ask a Nevius Bull how many GPUs are on this new deal, they couldn't tell you. And it's not their fault because it wasn't disclosed by their management team, but like to me, it's a, a pointless endeavor and conversation and it just becomes what appears to be, you know, a hype machine at this time because you can't, it's an exciting partnership and it's moving the industry forward and it does require capital investment, but at some point people are here to make money and I haven't seen evidence of that with the two companies that you're mentioning. So to say that they've won the race when they're Losing money seems like at a minimum iron as an opportunity to catch up along with other neo-clouds for that matter, if they can do it more efficiently.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, totally. You know, it's interesting regarding the deals that we're seeing come alive and secured regarding the hyperscalers and providers, whether it's co-location or you know, a step further from that, like you talk about the transparency side, right? Like, we really don't know what a lot of these deals are, what exactly the terms are, how many GPUs, the dollar figure, the exact power IT load gross that's being used. I mean, the reason it's an example, I think, is is a good one, is on a smaller scale as well, what I believe to be a smaller scale, even though we don't know the exact terms, but Cipher, the 15-year lease with an investment-grade hyperscaler, zero details, right? No tenant name, no megawatts disclosed. People speculate and have a good idea on what site it is, whether it's Stingray or Revelle, right, like 200 megawatts, or is it 100 or 70? But again, no pricing, nothing. Same thing with Core Evanthropic last week. We're getting that it's a multi-billion dollar, right, like multi-year agreement, but there's no real specifics on what those dollar figures are, the gigawatts, and the timelines beyond just a phased rollout. So, you know, I don't know exactly what your thoughts are on that, but for me, I think that just the sudden secrecy. I don't think that it's not that there's a plan, right? And it's not that they just are securing compute without kind of free-balling it. It's just that this race has really gotten intense and competitive that no one is just wanting to show their cards anymore. So when you're in a real scramble for what is constrained and what's limited, the power, the LAN, the memory, GPUs, you don't want your competitors knowing your pricing. So that can be a pretty decent reasoning for it. You know, the pricing, the capacity commitments, your expansion plans, and how much you're willing to pay. I think that obviously that's the biggest part. So it becomes a, like the information is kind of a competitive disadvantage. It can spark some bidding wars and drive up costs for everyone, right? Which I think is in the advantage of the neo-clouds, the providers. Because again, that's where the build-outs are flowing. The capital's flowing downstream and the build-outs are heading that way. Plus, everything's just moving at a warp speed, right? Like the last thing that these companies want just on top of it, which is slightly a little bit less important to what I just previously talked about, is none of these guys want public scrutiny. or political pushback, and we're seeing a lot of that right now. Utilities are using the announcement to renegotiate even higher. So NDAs are, I mean, they're the standard in a business like this, but they're really becoming the standard with landlords and local governments and even the cloud providers themselves. So the bullish part of it all, right, for the infrastructure space is that the level of secrecy is Actually, I mean, I take it as clear, clear proof that the demand is, I want to get another word for insatiable. Let's call it like ferocious, ferocious demand, right? When the fight for power and compute is getting pretty serious, everyone stops talking, right? And they're executing behind closed doors. So if you don't have a comment on that, I have something else for you.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: To answer that, I think what I struggle with right now, despite having ownership in a co-location provider in Cipher, is I think it's becoming more clear that it's one thing to sign capacity, it's another to deliver it. And that's not a knock on Cipher in Wolf. It's actually me saying to them that in some ways I believe Tyler and Patrick have sold themselves short in that this business model, I was looking, I think it's Abernathy is a joint venture with FluidStack that Wolf has. That's a 25 year lease with fixed terms. When I say out loud that 50% of the data centers that are scheduled to be delivered are delayed right now, And yet they signed a fixed lease that's 25 years. I mean. And it provided them credibility, no different than people who want to come at iron for a ****** ****** is debatable, but less than optimal deal terms with Microsoft with GB 300s below. $3, I think it came out to 291 an hour, where now it appears, I mean, their own guidance is that their B300s will generate $3 an hour. So someone could say they signed Microsoft too early, but I would disagree with them, but for another reason. But what I would say in running those two parallel examples, people get frustrated with Dan. when he talks about optionality and we're anxiously waiting on a new deal, but he's going to end up being right about this because it's a game of musical chairs where providers like Cipher or Hutt or Wolf, they sign these deals and that's great, but they locked up their capacity when there's two to three-year delays on long lead items for transformers. You have behind the meter providers that want to come into the market, but realistically, like it's going to be two or three years before they can provide a data center. So you have this extreme bottleneck where there's two examples with Iron that their children's example, the whole deal was like $9 billion, $1.9 billion. per year by five years. So like 9 and a half, I think it was 9.7 total, but the cost of it was like 5.8 for the GPUs and then another $3 billion for the data center. So 9.7 minus 8.8. So not the greatest returns. And there was arguments about the levered returns or whatever, but what people are forgetting about or don't understand is That was only for five years. They paid off the GPUs with that deal and they paid off the data center with that deal. So in year six through 20, if Colo's such a great model, they can sign a Colo deal later at the market rate in five years, which you're going to argue that supply is going to, you could argue that there's going to be more data centers, but I would tell you that history is showing if Anthropic's any proof that the token growth's exponential and the infrastructure growth cannot meet it. So in theory, over time, it's definitely a bet directionally, but I'm happy to be placing that bet on the growth of AI given the success of Anthropic. And I think you're going to look back at some of these deals that were executed and while it helped them change their shareholder base and attract institutions by showing a transition from their Bitcoin mining roots to a new REIT-like co-location provider. I just think long-term, it can be a, both things can be true. It can be a successful investment that will attract a higher multiple over time. And I think both are relatively cheap right now to where they're going. But I do think the neo clouds offer a higher rate of return in exchange for that risk. But the way the contracts are being structured right now, at least at Iron, their GPU obsolescence is covered for by those initial contracts. So then everyone who's pointing at the constraints, or excuse me, the capital intensity needs will GPUs, if it's with the hyperscaler, they're able to fund 90% of it, like the Microsoft deal via customer prepayments and GPU financing for below 6%. So kind of just, I'm trying to keep it not about iron and just talk about the industry because I know there are other players there, but when people ask me why I'm dismissive for lack of a better word of some of these other companies, it's like I'm trying to explain the line in the sand right now as to why I feel a certain way about it. And it's not just some dismissive absent, you know, negligence on my part where I just assume that one is better than the other. It's like, no, we've taken time to evaluate both and That's the conclusion I've come to. But you said you had another topic in or a question.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, but no, I think you, just to piggyback off what you were saying, I think you make a really good point. There's clearly an optionality perspective, right, that some operators are really positioned to take advantage of right now. The terms that you're going to get, the contracts, the deals that you're going to get currently, Today are better than they've better than they ever have been and I think that's going to continue for quite some time eventually there might be a Feeling for that down down the road, but it doesn't look like It's happening just yet and and Kind of like what you were saying the setup right now is I don't want to say that some Some of these operators and providers have rushed into long term deals, right? The 15 to 20, even the 25 year leases, but they do come with fixed pricing. They do come with pretty rigid terms. They give the hyperscaler like a level of certainty and comfortable comfortability, but they also lock them in to yesterday's rates is basically what we're getting at while the demand is exploding. So, you know, I think that the optionality is getting a pretty like massive tailwind, too, from the supply supply side, as you said, half the data centers, which is pretty hard to wrap your head around. It's 48% is the number. that were planned to come online this year, 2026, are delayed or canceled. So 50% of the expected new capacity, only about a third is under construction right now. So when half the competition is delayed, canceled, disrupted, whatever it whatever it may be, the providers who have the sites are becoming more and more valuable. And again, the hyperscalers, they can't wait for delayed projects, right? They need it now and they can't. There's no ways around this. But you know, the only pushback I would have is like, of course, there's still a clear benefit to signing those 15, 20 year leases, right? Especially doing them once the terms are right. The the long term contracts, they just you just get like a sense of some some rock solid revenue visibility for years ahead, especially some of these guys just being insanely capital constraint and having to cover and focus on their interests today, right? De-risking the balance sheet is a huge benefit, especially somewhat early in the cycle. So you de-risking that CapEx and making finance debt a little bit easier to secure. You're kind of just trying to show the market that your assets are contracted and and very high quality for the long haul. So trying to be less volatile, a little bit more predictable. And obviously, like the large banks, they love they love the cash flows. Now, moving from that a little bit off off of that, just speaking about, you know, iron in general and I butcher, feel free to cut me off if you got to go. I really appreciate your time and having you on here tonight. There's clearly tons of construct. I mean, we've talked about this a little bit in DM. It's been a it's been a while since I since I brought it up, but there's a clearly like the focus, the construction focus right now is that there's a lot going on in at Sweetwater, Texas, right? But from like a pure deal making and securing like hyperscaler compute perspective slash not just hyperscalers, you know, securing and selling compute. landing the next contract with the likes of these names that are, that basically are the ones that need it, right, and that they're the demand. What do you think is like the top priority site available right now? Is it pushing the remaining 450 at Childress, the, you know, BC, Canada, or Sweetwater? You know, this is kind of just a fun question, right? It's all speculative and it's I mean, I wouldn't say it's ridiculous, but I'm just wondering what your take is on it.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: I think it's a little nuanced. I think if they were operating as a private company, I could argue that they're better off finishing Childress first because it's cheaper and they could generate cash flow sooner. And I still lean towards that part of my hesitation with. With the killer, excuse me, Sweetwater site is. I believe Rubin will be available next year, but we also believed in Q4 that Delwood would deliver our GPUs on time, so. I think Sweetwater would be better for the stock in the interim and for everyone in here who's an iron shareholder, assuming management can deliver on it and get the right deal terms. Yeah, I would like to see Sweetwater signed because I think having your flagship site that you've been talking about for two years, sitting idle when there's been multiple tweets from our CEO speaking to Time to Compute, being everything, I would be lying to you if I didn't say I'd be disappointed if they didn't fill Sweetwater sooner than later. I also believe with Sweetwater specifically that the longer they don't announce energization, I'm actually more bullish on it. And I think that they're going to pair energization with a deal announcement is my That's just my gut feeling right now because we, I think, we still have Franz up here. And I mean, I don't like when you have someone as talented as Franz on your team who's getting used in institutional reporting, like we have access to that. Like why I wouldn't lean into that or why anyone wouldn't lean into that is beyond me. Is it a calculated risk? Sure, but if you don't want to time it, then don't play the option game. But he has shown you through satellite imagery and then the help of the drone shots via the gentleman. His name is escaping me. But I mean, they have a site that's 1.4 gigawatts that's ready to roll. And Franz can speak to the power a little better. My understanding, though, is the way the bulk substations are set up. Again, bulk substations take power from the grid and dial it down, and then there's another layer of substations that dial it down so that you don't fry up your equipment. But there's essentially 700 megawatts available, let's say, or maybe it's 600 over two or three plots, and he can correct me later and make fun of me. And it's enough to be dangerous right now, but he has a nice post on it. So if that's available, and Dan has said twice in a tweet in both February and March, time to power is everything, yeah, I think Dan is setting himself up to deliver that. Having said that, I've been leaning more into Childress lately because I also think a hyperscaler, specifically Google or Anthropic, are sexy brand names that would help rewrite and draw more institutional investors, which is ultimately what we want to stabilize the cap table so that we don't have the likes of Jane Street ******* with our shares during the day in the future. And I'd rather have more long-term minded people in there. But at the same time, another way to draw institutions is to show profitability. And there's a clear path to profitability in Canada and in Texas because they already built the data centers. And that's another distinction, small cap, is yes, they have to retrofit these data centers, but they built them with the intent of using them for AI someday. So yes, there's a 2 million in Canada or 3 to $4 million per megawatt retrofit fee associated with it. But the majority of the spend, if you guys tuned into our interview with Dan, is on the data center shell itself. So that's already been done. That's how they differentiate themselves, at least in Canada and at Childress, between the likes of a core, excuse me, Cipher and Wolf right now. Those are greenfield sites, meaning they're starting from scratch, or maybe one of them's a brownfield where they're retrofitting it. I think that was the Kentucky site for Wolf, but someone can correct me on that. But for Iron specifically, if they can spend 3, $4 million a MW versus 10 to $12 million a MW, and oh, by the way, it's way faster and they're able to attract better GPU rates given the compute shortage right now, those things will be printing money. And I had a post last night that our current guidance is 3.7 billion, and that doesn't even include 400 megawatts at Childress, which people close to my team, including friends, believe it's possible that the company ends up guiding having that completed by the end of the year, which if they attracted competitive rates in the marketplace that or like 350 an hour, that you're looking at an additional $4 billion of ARR. And meanwhile, I think Nevius currently guides 7 to 8 billion and we're at 3.7. So I mean, I'm anticipating them adding some after the meta deal and some of the other stuff going on. Maybe they get to 10 billion, but if we're showing 7 or 8 billion when last year we were at 30 million, like Who's growing faster, Iron or Nevius? So I'm excited for Dan to speak in a few weeks and start speaking a little more with his chest out, because I think they've been working really hard since February to build up for this moment and get their **** together. And I think they remember that February day, and I sure as hell remember that space on February 5th. watching after hours, us dip to $29 a share after announcing an additional site and announcing more details of a growing business. But at the time, just the market didn't like it due to Bitcoin bottoming out and kind of, it was a foreshadowing the war that we've experienced the past few months. So it's been a long time coming since February, but I think The tide is turning here the last week or two, and it's setting up for an interesting three or four weeks, and we're here for it. So I think if I didn't answer your question, I'm sorry, but I think I spoke to a lot of it.

Small Cap Snipa: No, no worries, my man. It's always a pleasure having you on. True masterclass delivered right there. I really appreciate you and your knowledge, Franz, as well, you guys. Sometimes I think that you guys are insiders, man, like CIA agents of the AI world. Anyways, yeah, it has been a long time coming. It's a long time waiting, but I think that this is a long time frame kind of thing. We all talk about the early stages and, you know, the executives, the leaders in the industry, right, like the Eric Schmidts of the world, Jensen, even Dan Roberts and different CEOs. Michael Intrater for Corey, he said the same thing, that we are really in the early stages of this build-out. Barely any compute has been brought online in the grand scheme of what the demand is and what these companies are targeting with respect to their CapEx spend and their projections on the power and the total compute that they need to deliver, not just till 2030, but 2035 and on as well. I see we got Ernest Hamilton, Ernest Hemingway Hamilton in the chat tonight. How you doing, Ernest?

Ernest Hamilton: Hey, doing pretty good, small cap.

Small Cap Snipa: Awesome, brother. What do you got?

Ernest Hamilton: Hey, just wanted to touch base a little bit. Some of my thoughts and opinions on the co-location. You know, we were talking a little bit about the terms and some of the deals that are getting signed for, you know, 15, 20, 25 years. And I have a different opinion on that. Part of the lease agreement is going to be escalation clause. So, they're going to be that revenue, the annual revenue is going to be growing year over year, based on whatever type of escalation clause they have written in the contracts. And then when you're looking at the whole REIT style data center, one of the big important parts about having a longer term lease is that when you go to refinance, you're going to go to try to get a traditional debt. And when they see a long-term lease, you're actually going to get more favorable interest rates on that refi. So you're going to be able to basically take that seed money, refinance it, and then be able to kind of use that to continue to scale. And then, of course, the other big part is when you're just looking at the infrastructure portion, your depreciation cycle is going to be a lot longer, of course, than just the GPU portion. So you don't have that, you don't have that additional depreciation, that's going to hit your balance, that's going to actually show up on your earnings report and kind of pull down a little bit on your EPS. And then the last, the last thing really is just the obsolescence risk, right? So that risk stays with, you know, the chip providers. So it's just one less thing to kind of worry about if you just stick to the co-location. I'm not saying that it can't work. Of course, with risk, there's rewards, but that's just some of my opinions on why when I see some of these longer term leases, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I think there's still a lot of power out there that's available. It's just a matter of getting those agreements and kind of building together the the justification, for, getting getting those power contracts signed, we're still seeing some of those coming online in various states. So I I'm interested to kind of see that there was some reports that showed that, based on, based on the amount of power usage versus, the power utility providers, there was an excess amount. I think the biggest thing is having some of that optionality for curtailment. And that's why you may see some of these data centers with the leases signed with some excess power. When you're looking at the PUE percentages, maybe they signed a deal with 1.4 PUE, but when they start building in some of the equipment, maybe they can get the PUE down to 1.1, 1.2. And that's going to leave a little bit of buffer on megawatts that maybe 90% of the time that's going to be available. And they can do other things with that, whether they plug in a small amount of GPUs or whether they plug in some ASICs and do Bitcoin mining. I think there's optionality there. And you also, there's different terms on the utility agreement in terms of, what you're going to pay per kWh. So if you're able to, have a take or payer type of agreement as well to where you can actually get, negotiate better rates as well if you can consume all of the power, you know, that you're basically earmarking with a utility provider. So that's just some of my opinions on the co-location portion. Just kind of wanted to put it out there.

Small Cap Snipa: I mean, I think you make a really good point. I think that, look, I think it's a double-edged sword and it's not like, there's no negative to it, right? Like, obviously, you want to have the optionality in your deal-making ability and what you can provide regarding the price, GPUs you provide, the energy constraint, but also You know, some companies are not every company is the same and no one's positioned correctly, right? You have to position yourself in the best way possible for the future and your shareholders. So if you have to de-risk your balance sheet and provide balance sheet optionality, right, and lock in a long-term lease, then so be it. So I definitely see what you were saying. And I was kind of saying, you know, the same thing in probably about 20 minutes ago as far as, you know, I can't just like say that it's a bad thing to sign a 15, 25 year deal when the terms are right. You know, like there's a clear benefit to that. And I think Butcher was saying the same thing too. Butcher, I see you got your hand up.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: I was just going to ask Ernest, I don't, going back and forth on Colo versus, I mean, I think you've made some, good counterpoints. I mean, I feel the way I do about it. I think I understand what you're saying. So I want to respect what you said. But I'm actually wanted to pivot and you seem to correct me if I'm wrong, but your focus is primarily on CleanSpark right now. And we're trying to, you know, this isn't IRAN or Cipher or Wolf specific. So maybe for anyone in here that owns CleanSpark, I haven't heard much. I saw the tweet that you're referring to from Matt on the, I think it was the Duke study regarding the usage at the given sites, and you just spoke to load balancing, but I think the only, I think I'd best turn you are the two key clean spark poles that I see, and I know that you guys are expecting a hyperscaler deal at some point, but are there, Any other updates or are you involved with Kiel or any of the other minors transitioning to AI? I think it would be a good way to provide additional context for some of the people in here who aren't focused on the areas that I focus on and I selfishly want to learn instead of just speak about what I've already been looking at the past 12 months. So if there's anything you can add, I would appreciate it.

Ernest Hamilton: Yeah, no, you hit a nail on the head there. So, my majority of the focus is a bit on CleanSpark, but it's really just understanding their thesis behind where management's kind of trying to move the business and just making sure it still makes sense in the sector. And, I do pay attention a little bit with some of the other companies, of course. And I guess to kind of talk a little bit more about the... the Duke study that you're talking about, about the load balancing and the peak shaving, that is one option that some of the companies are looking at because when you sign the deal, maybe you have a 500 megawatt site, but you have to look at the PUE, all of the energy costs basically to cool everything and you just kind of run the facilities there. So there's going to be a certain delta that it's going to diminish and it's not going to be part of that critical IT load. So whenever you know, those agreements are kind of put in place. You really have to protect, you know, the peak seasonal times where you're going to get that, you know, really high heat situations and you have to be able to cover cover those in that PUE calculation. So, you know, the majority, you know, I would say, like I said, about 90% or so of the year, you know, you're not going to necessarily have to run, you know, the cooling infrastructure and everything else like that. at that high limits. So because of that, there's going to be a certain amount of megawatts that are available. So like I said, whether it's GPUs, whether it's Bitcoin mining, there's options there. And what I really find fascinating with all the Bitcoin mining companies that are making this pivot, whether they've already done it or they're getting ready to do it, is they definitely understand how to hunt for power, how to go out, how to find those power contracts. But then the other thing is they already have these machines And some of them have the modular infrastructure as well. So once they sign that power contract and lock in a certain amount of megawatts, they can basically start to deploy some of that module infrastructure and start monetizing that new power while they're building the green space next to it for the HPC data center leases. So I think that's really powerful. I will be interested to see, as more and more power contracts are signed, more power pipeline is kind of put into the certainty category. If the companies are either looking to do that, or if they're looking to deploy GPUs, in a short period of time, while they kind of... I guess I can't, it'd be difficult to do that with the GPU side of things because of, you know, the full build out. But it would just be interesting to see if more and more people are looking at that. And I think as the price of Bitcoin kind of changes or as the, you know, the GPU rental prices change, I think we're going to see, you know, some influx of both of those things.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Well, Ernest, was the only thing you didn't touch on What sites are you excited about for CleanSpark? What's your expectation of when they might sign something in the near term? What their capacity might be like? 'Cause it's kind of the theme right now earlier, specifically Anthropic, a company that as of January 1st of 2025 had a $1 billion annual recurring revenue where now we're in April. you know, roughly 13, 14 months later is 30x. So they could definitely use some more data center capacity. And is CleanSpark one of those potential opportunities? Like what sites specifically? I think they're, I'm speaking out of ignorance here. That's why I'm talking to an expert here. But I believe you guys had a larger site in suburban Atlanta that might be. part of that? Or is there something else that is kind of the eye of the hyperscalers right now?

Ernest Hamilton: Yeah, so right now, one of their largest sites that's currently hashing is Sandersville. It's about 250 megawatts. So depending on the POE factor they use, it could be anywhere from, I think it was 210 megawatts down to about, you know, 178, 177 megawatts. And they're actually, they acquired property right next to their current Bitcoin mining facility. So they're going to be able to continue hashing while the site gets built. They've already been in discussions with a specific hyperscaler of what exactly that needs to look like. So I think they've already put in all the engineering work. And then Matt actually, you know, commented on someone's response today and basically put an X up in terms of GPU. So they're not planning on purchasing GPUs. So that kind of solidifies my thesis and where I thought they were going to go. And I think they mentioned it before in some of the Ernie's calls, but they are, pushing the co-location side heavily. So I do see that. I think that the Sandersville site's going to be the first one. They've kind of talked about that a little bit. And then they're focusing on the second site being Sealy and in Sealy, Texas. And that one's going to be about, I think it was 280 megawatts or 300 megawatts. is going to be that facility. And then again, you got the factor in the PUE ratio on that site from at least my research, because I already dug in and kind of figured out where that site location was. That's pretty much they have the approval to build out the substation, but they still have to do all of that as well. So if they choose to use the same hyperscaler for the Sanders Sandersville deal and then kind of start Moving forward into the discussions on a second site, I could see them, you know, going ahead and locking in a second agreement for the Sealy site. After that, whether the next site, like you mentioned the suburban area, so they do have really small, maybe edge compute size facilities near Atlanta. There's a College Park location and there's also a Norcross location. One of them is about, I think it's 70 or 80 megawatts and the other one is about 50 megawatts. I could pull up my spreadsheet now, but I don't want to stop the train of thought here. So those are going to be obviously a lot smaller. And those facilities actually used to be data centers before they got converted over to Bitcoin mining. So there's some bones in terms of some of the buildings. So there's a small amount of brownfield kind of retrofitting you can do, but I think they would probably gut all of the cooling infrastructure and everything else like that in order to make sure they can get the high density racks required for the latest kind of GPU compute GPUs. And then after that, pivoting back to Texas, they actually already locked in and purchased another site and got power contracts for, I think it's 300 megawatts in Brazoria County. And then part of that deal was that they would also be able to a year later sign up for or get an additional 300. megawatts. So all together in Texas, you know, they have somewhere close to about, I think it was 800 or so, 850 megawatts of power for Texas, which is a pretty decent site. And then they've discussed, of course, I have not seen anything yet, but within two years from now, they're going to start looking at more like a giga campus size. So, you know, I'm expecting to see larger sites than just, you know, 300 megawatts kind of coming online for clean spark. But this is going to be, you know, a couple of years from now. and I don't mind it necessarily because the way in my mind, I kind of see this as kind of flipping real estate. So after the first deal is, signed and they're starting to generate that revenue, they're going to look to refinance that and they're going to be able to pull out probably more money than they actually kind of put in from a seed money standpoint. And then they're going to be able to take that and kind of stack that in for the second lease. And then they're kind of just going to continue doing that. And that should help shareholders because again, they're not necessarily going to need the ATM. Maybe they signed a convertible to kind of help them bridge between two of the facilities as they get the refinancing going. But that's kind of, that's the path I see for them. So they already have 1.8 gigawatts under contract. and they're only using 108 of those for Bitcoin mining. So they have about a gig of power already contracted. And I already talked a little bit about the Sealy sites and the Brazoria site. So some of their other sites are in Tennessee, and I looked up data centers, and Tennessee is not very high up on the list, so I'm not sure if there's regulations. in Tennessee or what's going on with that. But obviously Virginia is the heaviest and I think Texas was #2 if I'm not mistaken. And then I think Georgia was kind of up there in the top five. And then the other two, the other three states they're in would be Mississippi. They have a, you know, I think it's two sites there. And then in Wyoming, they've got another two sites and then they just announced a single site in South Dakota. So and. The South Dakota site's pretty small. I think that's just going to be like some low dollar Bitcoin mining options where they can kind of move some of their Bitcoin mining site ASICS.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Small cap, I have one last question for Ernest, if that's okay.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, no, of course. Go for it.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Like running parallel, Iron hired a gentleman by the name of... I believe his first name's Jonathan, but Jonathan Gross, let's say, where this was a gentleman who had experience in HVAC and provides technical expertise where he can help design the data centers to optimize cooling, specifically in Texas. And you had spoken to the varying PUEs and a lot of your guys' power portfolios. in the Southern United States, primarily Southeast, and now you have the new site in Texas. What I struggle with, and maybe, and this is a good opportunity to get clarity for people who don't understand like me, but Matt and Zach were pretty against AI for the longest time, and I give Matt credit for making the 180 and switching over, and they're through the transition. I believe you had McKinsey on site and you guys are executing your pivot. I guess my question to you would be, who are like, every company has the guy you go to and specifically like Dan and maybe Will for iron are in Australia, but you still have Kent based out of Canada or now Jonathan Gross in Texas with their construction team. Like who are the key players or in a parallel example, Cypher has ex Google and Facebook data center builders on their team that kind of gives people confidence in their ability to build and deliver tier 3 data centers. Like who are some of the key hires at CleanSpark that you guys are excited about that will help you bridge the gap from your mining past into an AI future?

Ernest Hamilton: So really two people come to mind, the first of which is, a newer hire by CleanSpark, and that would be Jeffrey Thomas. So, his, where I think he's going to be able to help them is some of his contacts that he has from his years in the HPC industry. I was going to just confirm, I should know this off the top of my head, you know, where Jeffrey Thomas came from. I think he's listed on the management team now, if you can. Yeah, here we go. So, yeah, where is it? I could the other guy I'm gonna be able to rattle off like crazy, but he it was like it was a Middle East company that he did a lot of work with, and it was a lot of inference, so he understands, you know, that aspect. If I look, I could probably just find him on LinkedIn, but let me just let me pivot over to the other guy. It's gonna be Taylor Monig. So Taylor Monig, he is, you know, their chief technology officer. He's brilliant in terms of being able to squeeze as much hash as possible out of the Bitcoin mining ASICs. And he's very knowledgeable on the fluid engineering side of things in terms of coolant. Oh, it's my friend Josh Castle just reminded me it's Humane. That's where Jeffrey Thomas came from. So if you look up that company, they're very rich in the HPC AI side and then the inference over in Saudi Arabia area. But going back to Taylor Moonig, so he actually owned his own company with one or two other people and they were very much into the emerging cooling technologies for the Bitcoin mining. And this was early, early years. And he was actually developing even some of like the, I think there's a phase two type as well. That's even more efficient, but it's a little less stable. So that was more just like R&D. I don't know a lot of people that have necessarily dove into that. But if you look up this guy's background and you listen to some of his interviews, he's very, very knowledgeable on what would be required in order to, pull heat out of a specific system. So if you're looking at it from a process engineering or fluid engineering standpoint, he's definitely going to be able to handle, you know, the HPC, you know, side, you know, whether you're talking about pulling heat out of a Bitcoin miner or you're talking about pulling it out of, you know, a GPU cluster, it's all fluid engineering. So he's definitely going to be able to kind of reign in that technology and really help them, achieve those efficiencies, because I think that's going to be really important as well as these companies are, are trying to trying to get a little bit more profits out of, this sector. It's going to be really important on their cooling efficiencies. So you have some people that are just using the air cooled GPUs, which are going to have a lot higher PUEs, and then you've got people that are starting to use the immersion style GPU cluster. So again, it's going to be very interesting to see exactly what they select. We know that they had a partnership with Summer, which is an actual immersion type HPC AI modular company. So they already have a lot of experience with, I believe it's Dell, AMD, and even with NVIDIA. So, you know, knowing that, I feel I feel strongly that we'll see some immersion type infrastructure in their cooling processing.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Great. Thank you, Ernie. It was good to catch up. I haven't spoken in a while, and I think at least I get accused of talking about iron too much. So sometimes you got to go down the path less traveled. So thanks for providing a different point of view tonight.

Ernest Hamilton: Yeah, no problem. Good talking to you Bitcoin, Bitcoin Butcher.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, I'd actually like to kind of like keep that, keep the conversation going because Ernest, I know that your like background is in power generation. And if we're just sticking to like broadly CleanSpark, I'm sure you saw what Matt posted this week or whether a couple of days ago, I'd love to get your take on it. The Duke University study on the grid headroom. And that basically the premise is that the existing power grid in our country across the largest balancing areas that cover 95% of the use have massive amounts of capacity that's untapped and it can handle something up to like 125 gigawatts of new flexible load if the big users, like the data centers or the factories, can be a little interruptible, right? And basically, they just need a little bit of a pullback just to dial back on the power for like less than a percent of the time during the rare moments where there's peak stress. I'll find the tweet. When you start talking, I'll find the tweet and pin it to the space. But you were talking a little bit about Bitcoin mining, too. And Matt, I mean, I would say that he tied it directly to it, the interruptibility and pairing it with computing is a no-brainer. That's, those were his words, right? So they're not really guessing. They're building to maximize each megawatt if you want to, if you say it like that. So I'd love to get, you know, your thoughts on it and how basic, how is the company thinking about leveraging the flexible load strategy as they move forward and converging, right, between Bitcoin mining and AI.

Ernest Hamilton: Yeah, definitely. I went ahead and added my response to Matt because it goes right into what you're talking about. So some of the people, if you listen to some of the block space conversations, they call it mullet mining. Basically what it is, you've got your critical IT load, you have your GPUs and everything like that on the front end with your signed counterparties, and then there's gonna be a certain amount of excess power that basically it's like power under reserve for those, you know, peak moments whenever they need it. And then, you know, if these, if you're a company that's already been doing Bitcoin mining, you're very much keen to how to curtail power very quickly within seconds. So that's kind of where this whole mullet mining concept came about. So the thought process is, that extra percent of power that's basically just kind of on standby, for those minutes of flux, they'll use that for Bitcoin mining. So maybe it's, like I said, maybe 11 months out of the year, that power is going to be able to be monetized for that, instead of just kind of sitting there idle. Or the other option is having to have an extreme amount of fuel on site to be able to run generators and things like that to basically kind of mitigate any kind of issues with power to keep that uptime. So I think a lot of companies, instead of having to deal with that, they're basically just leaving some of that power on the table and kind of just available for any any time. It's not necessarily for curtailment, but it's for the opposite of that. It's for whenever there is a large load that kind of hits the grid. And, you know, and that large load typically happens about the same time that you're going to have a heat wave. You know, if you're down south or if you have like a really nasty cold winter up north and everyone's running their heaters, you're going to have the opposite effect of that season. So what the whole mullet mining situation is, is it's really just trying to capitalize on that excess power. and really monetize the full stack. Now, the big thing that the companies are going to have to kind of kind of come to an agreement with their tenants is, hey, you have to still be able to guarantee them that was at the five nine uptime. So with that, there has to be some form of what's in it for them. What's the incentive for the tenant to allow, you know, the, you know, the leasing company or whatever, sorry, the renting company to utilize their power, right? And that's where I think that you're going to see some forms of maybe some profit sharing, whether it's, hey, we can get a lower cost per megawatt by utilizing the full stack of power under contract. And because of that, the overall cost of the critical IT load is going to be slightly less on energy and you guys are going to kind of have that transfer through to you guys and we're going to monetize the excess power on the Bitcoin side of things. Or maybe there's some kind of split on the actual Bitcoin as well on the proceeds. So I'll be interested to see how a contract like that is set up. I have yet to see that. And if you guys have, let me know. But I think that's going to be an interesting kind of dynamic there. And then, you know, as far as what Matt was talking about, if I click on his tweet, I guess he used Grok to summarize the Duke University study. That's what you were talking about.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah.

Ernest Hamilton: So they're saying that looking over 22 of the largest kind of balancing areas. So the areas that kind of see that really high flux of, of, of power draw at certain points in times. those areas that cover about 95% of the US electricity use. So these are some of the really heavily populated areas. The grid itself, according to this study, can handle 76 to 126 gigawatts, you know, of a flexible type load. So with that, according to this study, there's about out of out of that range is about 100 gigawatts on average. And it says in order It requires, in terms of curtailment or in terms of having kind of power reserves, they need to cut back on their power by about 1/4 to 1% of the time during this peak stress. So again, if you're only having to earmark that full power surge only about 1% of the time, then there's going to be a certain amount of power available to be, you know, monetized while it's just kind of sitting there on reserve. So that's kind of, that was the, he didn't necessarily see a link to the full story. That was just kind of like his main points and his thesis behind it is that there's a massive amount of power draw at the US and only 1%, only about 1% of the time is, all of that power really needed. So there is a good portion of that that's kind of just kind of sitting on the back end, at the utility company or, not being kind of passed through and consumed. So I think there's definitely room. And whether that, whether this is on the. GPU rental situation where you could basically kind of get get some get get some smaller edge compute going at some of these sites right next to some of the utility companies. Or maybe they get some kind of behind the meter, you know, agreements going as well as as ways to monetize that. There's just there's just a lot of optionality there. So I'll be interested to see that. And I think that and one of the earnings calls, you know, there was also some discussion about trying to get some contracted power behind the meter as well. So I'll be interested to see, you know, what that looks like. You know, again, my background is power generation on, you know, the manufacturing and repairs of the parts that are going to these large natural gas turbines. And we have, you know, this is public knowledge, but our backlog is going all the way into like 2030. So if a company wants to come in and, you know, basically purchase a new gas turbine, you're sitting for, you know, about four years before the construction, everything else like that could even kind of start to occur. So it's a it's a pretty long wait line, wait list. And that just shows you the demand, you know, for power right now in the US specifically.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, I it's a little hard. I wouldn't say it's hard for me to wrap my head around, but it's a it's a pretty crazy like How does, I'm trying to just understand how the actual infrastructure setup would work for something like that, right? Like, are you physically mixing GPU racks for compute alongside Bitcoin ASIC mining racks in the same building or halls? Or do you keep them in like separate zones, separate sections within the same site? Like, yeah, I mean, again, I'm not really, I'm not a, very well versed in the power generation side. I think I know as much as anyone that has done like, limited research on it. So I'm no expert by any means, but I don't know if that's something that you could touch on being in your expertise, if that makes sense.

Ernest Hamilton: What? I'm more on like the manufacturing of the parts and everything else like that. But what I could say is most, in my mind, again, if this is not right, someone up here, please let me know. But my thought would be that you'd have transformers, you know, for that same amount of power coming into the site and those would be set up off to the side for. the Bitcoin mining or the GPU on demand kind of edge compute rental kind of situation. And you basically would have a throw switch, if you will. And anytime that power needs to be curtailed, that switch just gets flipped.

Small Cap Snipa: Understood. Gotcha. I see we got some new speakers in the house. AI guy accepted the invitation. I got to give it to you, my friend. We were on spaces the last last week. Talking just a little bit about the market, I believe Iron was trading around, I wouldn't say 30, but we were in the mid to low 30s and you were screaming from the rooftops, buy, buy, buy. Probably one of the only ones that really held stand, held firm with the thesis. So go for it. The floor is yours.

BitcoinAIGuy: Dude, it's heating up. I think we're going to see 50 this week. Let's see how the market reacts to that. And I don't think 50 is the ceiling by any means. I think we're a couple of days, weeks away from a new all-time high. And I still think my 160 target is bullish. We could see a similar move that Nebius did, right? Of course, there could be a pullback, right? Like Nevius did the 120 to 70 and then still went to 160. Like that could happen. But I mean, dude, like Sweetwater is energizing this month. We're like 2 weeks away, right? Like we're in the middle of this month. I would not be selling covered calls in Ireland right now. I would still be buying. I think 50 is a good price still. Dude, I think I bought some last year at 52. So I think these prices are still a steal. If you have a multi-year horizon, no pun intended. Right. I think this story is going to get more interesting by the month, by the year, especially as they throw out profits in size, like, you know, Franz will talk to you about that in detail about, you know, you could see like a billion dollars in EBITDA next year per quarter, whatever, that's going to get the attention of some serious investors, right? And then, but what I'm excited for is the stock price as well, right? I mean, as this thing moves, you're going to see all of the, you know, the influencers talking about it again, all the YouTubers, the price is going to lead the narrative. Like we've been here so early, we know this stuff, right? But once the price gets into the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 100s, 110s, 120s, whatever, everyone's going to be talking about what we're talking about today, you know, six months ago, a year ago. And they're going to feel like a genius, right? And they're going to get scared when it pulls back from 120 to 70. And then you're going to see like the noobs, like Ghosty and David leaving gains. They're going to be like, I knew it was going to crash to 70. It's going to zero. It's going to go to 15. It's going to go to seven, right? gas station trade is going to come out, he's going to say it's going to go to two, right? And then it's going to 160. And then all the institutions are, you know, going to be piling in. And you're going to see that they've been buying in the 50, 60, 70s. And, you know, that's going to be the new support, right? You know, 30, I thought 34 was going to be the bottom. It was 31 and some change. You know, not too distant future, we're going to see a $70 support where it's not just, it's not going to go below that, right? The previous all-time high is going to be the new low, right? Like that's just what's going to happen. But yeah, I'm pretty, I'm pretty bullish, right? Like I was bullish, you know, in the single digits, I was bullish. You know, in the teens, I was bullish. at the previous all time high was bullish at the next the previous low. I'm still bullish. I'm going to be bullish when it's sideways. And I'm just trying to figure out ways to accumulate more shares. It's hard, right? Like the price is just going to keep going up. And like, you know, I have fun going back and forth with the nubious bulls. It reminds me Of my, my beef with the Mara pigs in like two, 2022, 23, right? When I was in earnest shoes, right? When I was pounding the table on, on CleanSpark at $2, right? Like I was getting so much, uh, **** right? Like people were talking about how good Marathon was as a miner, right? Like they have all this extra hash. They've got this huge huddle, whatever. Uh, they had a, uh, you know, uh, uh, zero debt that a low interest note or whatever, and they underperformed. Right. And now it feels like iron is like the clean spark, right, of back then. And instead of the Mara pigs going after us, it's it's the nubious. Right. And the the prices don't really make that like from a final mouse perspective, it doesn't make any sense. Right. But we've seen this before as iron balls, right? I mean, back to Clean Spark, when Clean Spark was in the twenties, it was like trading at 20 to 24 spring of 24 and iron was trading between four and six. Right. I mean, did that make sense back then? Right. Like you could see the the change, right? Today, right? Looking back, it's like, oh, it was obvious. I mean, Iron had so many gigawatts. They're vertically integrated. They had large sites. They scaled so much faster than CleanSpark. They had a lower power price than CleanSpark when it mattered, right? Like Bitcoin mining, very thin margins, that low cost powers is much more important than it is with AI, right? And then, the Nubius Bulls, they have no idea what they actually own. They have no idea what co-location is. They have no idea what those fees are. They're just buying it because the price is pumping. And they've been sold a narrative that Nubius has so many software engineers, but I don't know any software engineers that can deliver a data center on time, right? Like that is the true constraint. Right. And I was talking to someone from Nvidia today and they're telling me like, hey, dude, like, guess what Jensen said today? Like he said, internally that power is the limiting factor to AI. I was like, dude, I've been saying this for two years, bro. Like you and I have been talking about this. But he's like, nah, but like Jensen finally told us today. I was like, where have you ******* been? Right. And this guy is like in the industry and he's just figuring this out, right? Like we are very early. in this, it's not a popular thesis to the greater market, right? And I think we just got to understand that because, when you're on Twitter every day, like we are, and you're chasing these headlines, you're seeing, you know, we're seeing this crazy price action, it can, you know, we can easily lose sight of, you know, where the market is. So it's gonna take some time for people to understand what's going on. And I think the price, just like in Bitcoin, the price is the best marketing. Once you're gonna see the next rally, everyone's gonna be sold and they're gonna be like, I knew Iron was gonna be a $200, $300 stock. It's gonna seem so obvious in hindsight, but it's not popular right now. And people are starting to get the attention back Because you're seeing influencers like Amit buying iron, $25,000 worth of iron, right? That is something I called a couple of days ago. I was like, once we get this pump, you're going to start seeing people post about it. And you're seeing some nubious early investors starting to talk about taking profits and rotating into iron. right? And they're openly posting this. It's not me just making up rumors. Like this is a fact, right? Like it is, it is what's happening. And, you know, I think it's going to be an obvious trade and we're still early to that, to that move.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah. You know, you said like, you said something about how it's hard to see sometimes. And I think that was kind of the, the point of the space, right? And earlier when we started like 2 hours ago, I gave a little temperature check just on the build out and what's happening right now. Obviously, you know, it's catching some fire, not just Coreweave and, you know, getting the deals with Meta and Anthropic. You had Nebius a couple of weeks ago with Meta, but these guys, these hyperscalers are not waiting around. They're the land securing the energy, the sites around the globe. Microsoft yesterday took over another one of OpenAI's Stargate data centers in Norway and another 30,000 Vera Rubin chips from Nscale. Google, $15 billion infrastructure build out in India. They're breaking ground on the 28th of this month. $10 billion in Japan, $10 billion commitment in Japan for infrastructure, from Microsoft and Anthropic too, which we didn't even really talk about tonight, is they're exploring major, major investments in data centers and energy in Australia. So for sure, the supercycle is accelerating. I think that we can all see that, right? Like backlogs are surging, buildouts are racing, and the capital is is flooding the infrastructure layer. But I also think you make a pretty solid point as far as, we've seen what, 3, 50% pullbacks in the last like 4 1/2, five months. You had the one from 70, all time highs to the 30s in December and then 60 to Excuse me, I guess there's been two, right? 63 in January to the lows that we just recently had. So yeah, I mean, the important thing is the fundamentals. The fundamentals have continued to stay strong. I just think it starts getting, it gets tough as an investor, especially whether you're overleveraged or not, right? Like any type of capital deployed, you want to see the the upside. You never want to see yourself go red, but it's just a part of the game. And in an environment that is extremely-- I don't want to say geopolitically driven, but just the headlines are through the roof right now. And they really have been this entire year. Anything can kind of screw up a trade, right? But I think that when you're positioned more so for long-term growth and just common stock or maybe very further outdated options, it kind of makes things a little bit easier to manage and kind of just keep that fundamental perspective intact. Butcher, I see you got your hand up.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: Yeah, we've had Frans up here for a while, so I wanted to see what he was going to say. But one quick thought on the macro. I mean, there's no guarantees, but I also think if Trump is at a UFC fight with Rubio. And then he's interviewing with a DoorDash employee who just delivered his McDonald's and then posting memes about being the second coming of the Pope. And then also, I think there were plans on taking over Cuba next. I think the market's just kind of numb to it now. And we saw the S&P break a record high today. And historically, that's like an 80% or 90% probability of a follow-through in the next 6 to 12 months of at least 10% to 15%. And I could fact check that later, but I know that the probability is 8 or 9 times out of 10 that there is follow-through, the percentage I'd have to double check on. So I just think the market is kind of like at this point, people are going to produce more oil. By the way, the US has produced more oil and exported 5 million barrels of oil today, I think I read. So we can survive this. And if anything, now we know that the straight can't be weaponized anymore because they already used that card. And it's kind of, there might be short-term increases to consumer goods and freight and whatnot, but you can see the futures already dropping. So it feels kind of like a temporary supply shock that will resolve itself. But I know with Franz, sometimes it's hard to get him with his familial obligations. So if you don't mind, small cap, I wanted to see what he had to say.

Small Cap Snipa: Absolutely, please. Franz, how you doing, my man? Floor is yours.

Frans Bakker: Hey guys, what's up?

Small Cap Snipa: What's going on, man? Just a, it's a nice night down here in South Florida. Good 80 degrees here in the middle of April. It's heating up. How about you? How's it going?

Frans Bakker: Yeah, all good. Quite content with the price action this week.

Ernest Hamilton: I was not too worried yesterday or today for you guys when we went red for a while, but

Frans Bakker: it was obvious that, you know, there's a firm bid on all these stocks. So, yeah, pretty happy. It's good. I'm on a short holiday break. We're having a little water fight here every day during this week of Songkron, it's called, so I'm not really near a computer at all. So just seeing the day-to-day price action is adding to the fun, so to say. So yeah, nothing else really up. I was listening to your space since the beginning. Kind of felt like I wanted to have a little push back on the whole clean spot. waste of energy. They will find it out, figure it out in a few years that they're late. So yeah, I'm not going to spend more time on that. I think one thing I will say is that Iron used to have Bitcoin mining next to GPUs in Prince.

Ernest Hamilton: George, but it was more lucrative to take them out. So, you know, maybe that's food for thought with your mullet mining.

Frans Bakker: Plans but uh other than that uh yeah not nothing much uh to say so any particular question I can try to answer it but uh those are my thoughts for now.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah I appreciate you coming on man um I think it's good that you're spending some time like away from the screen not looking at the price action you said you're playing in the water I assume like a waterpark or something with your kids or whatever you're doing. So I think that's, it's pretty important to do. You can't just get like crazy sucked up and just have your whole life revolve around the market. You got to live a little bit and enjoy, enjoy the fruits of the labor. I see we got Mike in the audience. I tossed him an invite if you'd like to come up. AI guy. So we talked about or Ernest, absolutely. You can please feel free to give a response as far as the clean spot.

Ernest Hamilton: Well, actually, I was going to touch base on something that Bitcoin AI guy was talking about, and that is the market kind of still being early in on realizing that power is the constraint here. You know, one thing I wanted to mention is there's an Energy and Investors Forum in Dallas, Texas coming up this July. And it's really just to bring, you know, some of these different like H.G. Wainwright will be there. I think someone from Cypher will actually be there. I'll be there. I think Mike Alfred will be there as well. There's just a large group of people that are really there just to kind of talk about the investment thesis behind, you know, just like what we're talking about right now is my understanding of what the actual investor forums all about is really to kind of provide, each of our thesis of investment, strategies around the energy sector and how it's being kind of capitalized for data centers now. So it's just, it's interesting now that you're starting to see, investor forums spinning up, just to kind of talk about this type of stuff.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, it's, I think it's really hard to navigate. I just got a just got a phone call. I think it's just crazy navigating the market right now and the whole the strategies that every company is taking with regards to their like this AI build out. I mean, I don't know if we got people were talking a little bit about today a top signal, right, that a struggling shoe brand down 99.9% from their IPO or basically basic all-time highs, struggling to make a profit, announced that they are now going to provide AI compute and raise money to purchase some GPUs, and the stock price goes up over 800%. That was pretty insane. It's funny. It's kind of a little bit about what we saw, or not what I saw, but just what investors saw. There were some parallels to the dot-com bubble. Obviously, I don't think that that's happening, but it's just kind of funny to see how just high and up investors are on this, like where the world is heading deeper and deeper into the cloud. Without further ado, we got Mike up here tonight. Mike, I was wondering-- thank you for joining, by the way. I was wondering if-- because I know you're going to be at Mar-a-Lago. a little later this month. I was there twice in 2024, once in March, and then right before the election in October, it was pretty electric. Trump was there. He spoke. It was for like a film premiere event. But I was wondering, because I saw, you know, the event for the Trump coin, are you actually one of the top 297 holders of the Trump coin or did you just, you know, get invited because you have the Mike Alford treatment and you just got invited to get invited.

Mike Alfred: What do you think?

Small Cap Snipa: I think it's some like alpha treatment, but it would be.

Mike Alfred: What do you think the odds are I own Trump coin? What do you think the odds are I own any meme coin whatsoever? What do you think the odds are I own any NFTs whatsoever.

Small Cap Snipa: I mean, I knew you didn't. I just wanted to, I just wanted to ask.

Mike Alfred: They reached out to me, the guy who created the meme coin for Trump and does a lot of his licensing deals. His son's kind of a cool, guy. He's kind of a Kind of interesting guy. I've never actually met him, but I talked to him on the phone. And he invited me to speak. He said he really wanted me to be there. And I said, I asked my wife, I said, I really don't want to go to Palm Beach. I really don't. Like, I really don't want to go anywhere, but I certainly like have no interest in. I was just in Miami like a couple weeks ago with my family and that was a nice trip. But honestly, after three, four nights, in Miami, I was like really ready to get out of there. Like I know you love South Florida. I know a lot of people do, but it's really not my cup of tea. But anyway, I'm going to go because they invited me and I'm on a panel with I think the CEO of Anchorage and a couple of other guys. Honestly, I barely paid any attention to it. I've put about 10 minutes of total time invested in thinking about going to Mar-a-Lago. But when I'm there, when I'm actually there in the room, I'm sure it'll be interesting, right? And they say still Sylvester Stallone might come for the Happy Hour, I like that show, Tulsa. I mean, I stopped watching it after the second season or halfway through the second season, I kind of lost interest. But I like Sly Stallone. Who doesn't like Sly Stallone? So look, that's Mar-a-Lago on this energy investors forum that Ernest was talking about. Another one where like I just, I'm just not doing any speaking engagements anymore. Like I'm trying to say no to everything. to preserve time for mostly family at this point because I don't really need to speak at anything anymore. But it's in Dallas and I just love Dallas so much. I just love that freaking Katy trail. I just like the energy in Dallas and a close friend of mine who used to live in my home city moved there. So he asked me and in like 2 seconds I said, okay, I'll go. And it's like in the middle of the summer, so it'll be super hot, just the way I like it, super hot and muggy. So yeah, I'm not doing much stuff, right? Like I'm really intently focused on this market. Like a lot of people are out marketing and going to stuff and traveling. I've just found so little value recently in being in person. I used to think being in person was so valuable, but I think everybody's along the spectrum of their careers and at different points you get more value from being in person than others. I'm living in the idea world right now, and I have everything I need in order to be successful, and I really just need to execute my strategy. So the last two months were actually wonderful because it was one of the more predictable outcomes in macro that I've seen in four or five years. It was very similar to last year, but shallower. And it was very obvious to me what the outcome was going to be, which is why I bullposted incessantly through those 60 days and did a little bit of buying and a little bit of rotating out of the defensives back into some of the stuff that you guys have been talking about in here. I really think that Bitcoin's gonna have a run, which is kind of ironic and fun because the best companies in Bitcoin mining are not in Bitcoin mining anymore. Like there are some companies that are okay at Bitcoin mining that are still in Bitcoin mining, but they're not the best companies, right? The best companies, the best run companies with the best management teams and the best operational expertise, those companies have all pivoted to AI because there's just so much money to be made in AI, which is what we were saying in these spaces like literally two years ago. And it was very unpopular for a while. There were a lot of people who were like, well, if you don't want to stick with Bitcoin mining, you're not going to be good at anything and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's just all been wrong. And that's just the way markets work. Like a lot of people are going to be wrong about a lot of things. Your job if you want to be great at investing, is you've got to largely get it right. You get it right as early as possible. And then when you get it right as early as possible, you got to size up so that you get the biggest possible outcomes. And there's a lot of hard stuff in there, but one of the hardest is to just keep holding during periods of time where other people are losing their heads. And I thought the last two months was quite easy relative to last, like March and April last year was more challenging. in my opinion. I thought this was easy, but I still saw people losing their heads. There's so many people in these so-called Bitcoin spaces whining about famine and the Strait of Hormuz and the end of the world and global margin calls and oil going to infinity. And two months earlier, it was silver going to infinity. And it's all noise. It's all BS. And the people, unfortunately, a lot of people listen to it. And they make changes. to their actual portfolio. I mean, I know many of you know how crazy that is, but there are people actually listening to this garbage in spaces and then actively changing their portfolio in a way that will change the slope of the curve of the rest of their life. They don't even realize how much damage they're doing to themselves. And I actually have been actively advising some people not to use X because there's just so much noise. AI, some combination of AI slop, and then these doomers that think they're smart, for whatever reason, like Bitcoin, but also seem to hate money because they constantly incinerate money. Every minor macro down cycle, they're trying to extrapolate very, very minor things into the world scenarios and basically scaring the **** out of people and getting them out of Bitcoin and getting them out of assets. And it's completely destructive. It's one of the most destructive behaviors that I've ever noted. on X. And I've tried to come out like this whole time, right? And people remember last spring, same thing, like March, April, I was talking about a potential for a V recovery. We got a massive V recovery. I posted about a V recovery in March again, saying the conditions were all there for that. And I got the same chart squiggler kid analyst kids who were like, no, no, Ben Cowan says it's gotta go down and everything's gonna get so much worse. And aren't you afraid of this, that, and the other? Aren't you afraid that your dog ate your homework and the straight of form movies is gonna be closed forever? And I'm like, no, like realistically, there's only gonna be a few more true social posts from Trump before the market becomes completely apathetic and loses interest. I literally said that. Now everybody's saying that, right? Like everybody's saying, oh yeah, the market's, it's not responding anymore to all the fear and whatever. And it's like, okay, come on guys. Like the markets, the S&P and NASDAQ are back at all-time highs and you've come to this wildly insightful conclusion now Where were you even just 10 or 12 days ago? Oh, yeah, that's right. You were drawing lines showing that we had to go lower. It's just crazy, the stuff that I see on here. But I'm just remaining intently focused on building these companies, seeing the companies we built, working with the teams, helping with strategy, helping with capital raising, capital allocation. You get around the list, there's a lot to do. And people forget that when they're just trading the equities, they forget how much work there is in meat space, like how much stuff, how many physical electrons and how much infrastructure actually needs to be moved around and constructed and how many long lead items need to be procured and how many things could potentially go wrong in that process. And look, Bitcoin AI guy constantly steals all my talking points. There's not too much more that I can say because he basically, I hear him and it's like literally a checkbox of everything that I've been talking about. And that's because he's smart, too, and he's making a lot of money, which is good. But he's not wrong about Nebius. I think what I'm realizing, though, more than anything, though, is there's just so much demand. I've been saying this for a while, right? I've been saying every single spare and idle megawatt in the US and any quality whatsoever at a reasonable price is going to be used for AI and secondarily for other use cases like Bitcoin, like that. probably wasn't a consensus opinion a year ago, but like, just look at what's happening now and you can see that the demand for this stuff is just off the charts. I mean, I can see it in my daily life. I can see it in my work and then I can see it in the market. And I think it's, as I've been saying for six or nine months now, it's only accelerating. And so that means a lot of people can win, right? So it's not so much about like, is Is Iron better than Coreweave? Or is Iron better than Nebius? Or is TerraWolf better than Cipher? Or Cipher better than Applied Digital? Those are interesting questions, I guess. But I think the bigger issue for some people is in the process of trying to answer those questions, they're trading too much and/or switching out of the market completely for various periods of time. And that's going to be more value destructive than whether you choose the right equity. As long as you choose anything in that kind of top tier of co-location providers and/or like neo-clouds, they're probably all going to do pretty well for a while, at least until people start to be able to differentiate between the firms that are really, really good operationally and the ones that aren't. And for a period of time, it may not matter, right? Because we're still in the period of time, and I brought this up a few times over the last quarter or two, we're still in the deal signing phase. right? We're still in the regime where it's all about what you announce and it's less about what you build. Although some companies, you can probably guess which ones I believe are these, are intently focused on that the whole time. And so while they may appear to be moving more deliberately, what they're really doing is making sure that they execute across the full lifecycle of these deals, as opposed to just announcing a whole bunch of stuff, not even be able to describe the economics, the net economics over five or 10 years and then maybe not even be able to deliver. We're already seeing some situations where firms are not going to take, right, they're not going to take the data center capacity that they contracted. You're going to see people who lose customers because they're not able to deliver under the contractual terms. They're going to violate SLAs, among other things. There's going to be energy market. in grid changes that impact some of these deals that, depending on how the deals were struck and written, are going to affect whether or not they actually play out the way they're modeled. So you're right back to where we were. And I think Bitcoin AI guy, again, because he's got all the right talking points, we're right back to where we were in like 2022, 23 in the old Bitcoin mining business where nobody really understands who's actually going to be good yet. But there's a lot of noise in the market. And so for a period of time, it's like all market beta. Everything just kind of trades together to some degree, right? If you look back a year, like a lot of similar performance. But I think over the next two or three years, you'll start to see more dispersion again. Just like we saw in Bitcoin mining, two or three years from now, I'm pretty certain the companies whose stock prices continue to appreciate significantly from here will have to prove that they can actually execute on delivering profitably on some of these deals that have been signed. And I'm very confident in sort of predicting that a handful of the so-called leading firms won't actually end up being leaders once you finally see who actually delivers. Because just keep in mind, there's way more deals that have been signed and announced than actual, you know, actual data centers that are built, purpose-built for AI that have actually been delivered. Right. There's just there's just so much more outstanding capacity that's sort of in progress than there is actually delivered. But overall, look, I think we've been through a little macro dip here. I mean, I'm not saying that there won't be more, but realistically, given what we've just gone through and given the market's reaction, I think it would be pretty foolish to think there's going to be some sort of big recession or something following this. The bears have been arguing there's going to be a recession basically since 21, 22 and effectively we did have a recession in 2022 and it was big enough that we're unlikely to have another one in spite of all of the things, all the monsters under the bed, inclusive of bank failing in 2023 and the yield curve being inverted and the Japanese yen carry trade being unwound. I mean, it's funny when you actually go back and look at what people are saying in those times and you realize, that there was this-- you can chart it on a graph. It goes completely vertical, where seemingly everybody everywhere is talking about one thing, and then you look back six months later, and you can't find anyone who's talking about it. When was the last time you heard any of these doomers in here talk about an inverted yield curve? When was the last time you heard anyone talking about the Japanese yen carry trade unwinding? When was the last time you heard them talking about the fact that banks have all of this mortgage debt and treasuries on their balance sheet, if it was actually marked to market, they would be insolvent. That's still true, but the market decided it didn't matter. And that just happens all the time. And it keeps happening over and over again. It's happening right now where you have people in here trying to scare you out of your AI data center shares and your Bitcoin when the market was just going to take a month or two to digest this. And then literally no matter what happens, the market was sort of going to go higher because everything was too compressed. for too long. And we still really haven't had a full cycle extension that actually goes through like an expansion in manufacturing and goes through like a real bull market in other sectors outside of technology. So like at worst, we're like fifth, sixth inning of an economic cycle. At best, we might be second or third inning. And when you think about AI CapEx, like look at what OpenAI and Anthropic are forecasting, like they're not forecasting a slowdown in CapEx spend for like three, four, five years. So where is this recession going to come from when the biggest companies of all time with the highest cash flow are willing to spend literally hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars to fund this? And yes, we had a little bit of a pullback since October, November. We had Michael Burry and Jim Chanos and the random people on CNBC who know nothing about the space saying it's a bubble and we've overbuilt. And We had a little bit of macro concerns. We had a couple of government shutdowns. And voila, you got a 50% or 60% drawdown in these stocks when under the surface, nothing's actually changed. If anything, as I said, everything's accelerating. So people are so easily confused and fooled by short-term price action, which is why I constantly advise people not to focus too much on that. And when I see-- I say my piece. I consistently bang the drum on things that I know to be undervalued. But after a while, you realize most people are just stupid, right? And they're not wired psychologically to be able to do this stuff. Even really smart people, even people who should know better, behave badly every time there's a drawdown. And it's annoying and frustrating as somebody who is trying to help. But at some point, you settle into a period of acceptance where you just realize that you're never going to be able to help. everybody, because most people are sort of masochistic and have some sort of wish to fail, right? It's the only thing that describes why you would subscribe to some of these chart squigglers and 24-year-old analysts with no business experience telling you to sell stuff that you should be buying. And that's largely what's been happening in these spaces over the last month or two, which is why it's mostly been a waste of time, because people have been saying to sell when you're actually supposed to buy, and it's always going to be this way. I just come to the conclusion that no matter how many times you tell people that this will happen, that they'll still do it. So in a sense, at some point it's kind of futile. There's no real reason to say it. And that's why occasionally I just stop saying it because it's kind of like, how many more times can you tell people exactly what's going to happen over long periods of time? And they still want to do things to hurt themselves. And fear is a mind virus. It tends to go viral during these, even in really minor drawdowns. I mean, this is barely a 10% drawdown in the major equity indices, right? And yet fear went completely viral. And I get it in crypto because crypto is, like everybody's lost money in crypto over the last four years, like everybody. A handful of people in Bitcoin who just held Bitcoin from 2023 have done okay. But there are a lot of people who are just frustrated right now. And so they're not in the mindset to make good decisions. So I'll leave it there for now. I appreciate you guys holding the space and I really couldn't be too much more bullish. I do think that I've been thinking this coming into 2026. I think 2026 could be quite a good year. I don't know if the period between April and December will be quite as good or April and October will be quite as good as it was last year, because last year we had significantly more fear during that bottoming process this year. I think because the dip in the equity indices wasn't quite as deep, there seems to be a little bit less fear. But I still think, I mean, the liquidity is there, right? And there are a lot of positive catalysts, there are a lot more positive catalysts that I can see than negative. And so don't be surprised if this runs through the rest of the year and into 2027. And if you can, if you overlay with CapEx for AI, there's no reason to believe that there's going to be a major slowdown until at least 2028 or 29. And that would probably be predicting the slowdown six months out, right? And so you could watch equities like SanDisk and Micron, and you can watch GE Vernova, and you can watch Vertiv and Constellation Energy and some of these guys, right, as kind of proxies to see that. But we just went through a dip and the market seemed to magically be just rerating things back higher because it turns out that actually there is no real slowdown in AI and there's no recession. So there's no reason for everybody to be freaking out. So all it was, once again, was another nice kind of fat pitch buying opportunity. And so if you ignored all the ******** and bought, you're probably going to be successful and happy if you got sucked into it and you sold a bunch of stuff. during this couple month period, I would just say what I always say, which is most people should hire a financial advisor, like probably 95% of people should hire a financial advisor, buy index funds in a diversified approach and try to retire in your 60s. This game is not really doing concentrated value investing or high growth, small cap investing, right, or very idiosyncratic investing. It's not a sport that everybody does. necessarily have to participate in. And I would argue if you can't do it full time, it's also going to be harder to compete. So I'll leave it there. Thanks, guys.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, I think that if there's anything that the market has shown us is that specifically over the last years is, I mean, it's just extremely resilient and clearly being driven by AI. No matter what the macro noise or headline, the tariffs, right, the money just keeps flooding into anything that is that is tied to this thing, this build out, the power, the infrastructure, you know, it's real conviction. And then as far as, as far as, you know, the fear mongering, the doomers, I think that everyone has their time. Everyone has their time, but it's quick to go back into hiding, you know. Fear sells, just like the phrase sex sells, fear sells a ton, especially here on X, you know, there's a lot of people, a lot of individuals that are actively trying to build their personal brands. And the best way to do that, outside of just being genuine and taking the time to provide whatever value you provide, is just making very dramatic, dire predictions, if you want to call it that, right? And I think that the easiest path to big attention and just traction is to call for these drastic outcomes, like crashes and bubbles. and collapses. And again, that's just like human psychology, right? Like our brains are like wired to prioritize threats over positive things. And it seems like it's a new thing every week. I was on a space with you a couple of weeks ago, maybe it was last week, and it was funny. You were talking about the private credit crunch and how that's one of the new things to talk about. And you said that before this whole thing came out, like most people had no idea what private credit is. And it's kind of funny, but it's probably true. But when you look at it from that perspective, right, Blue Owl and the Blackstones, Apollo, like they're clearly getting crushed this year. The stocks are, I mean, Blue Owl was down, like I said, I haven't looked at it in a couple weeks, but like 60, 70% at peak. And we're seeing these guys like cap their redemptions at 5% and there's some hysteria depending on who you speak to regarding that. But again, the market keeps on trucking, right? I mean, I was wondering, Mike, is just specifically like-- I mean, I guess you kind of spoke to it on your thoughts on the current private credit market and how a lot of these companies are going to be able to effectively raise the capital needed for their build-outs and to deliver it on time, de-risk the balance sheet. But I mean, I guess the answer to it is that not everyone's going to win, right? You're going to have some winners, you're going to have some losers. But it's clear that definitely the capital side of it is probably like the number one risk and execution risk for a lot of these companies. And when you're going and trying to raise capital, and again, I guess it just not to run in circle, but I guess it just depends on the infrastructure that that you currently have as well as like the long-term revenue that you've secured too to kind of just get those better terms. You know, I'm wondering if you kind of see this thing continuing to progress or if just the private credit crunch is all noise to you. I mean, I guess I kind of answered it myself.

Mike Alfred: It's not all noise, it's just, it takes a bit of nuance and a little bit of time. to actually understand what's going on and how it might impact the companies that we've invested in. I did talk about this maybe three weeks ago, three weeks ago. I forget exactly when, two, three, four weeks ago on Scott Melker's thing. He asked me about this. And what I said was that private assets have been mismarked since 2022, right? Because 2022 is the major re-ratchet right in a lot of assets that were publicly traded where there was liquidity that didn't impact and didn't didn't affect private companies because private companies that didn't need to raise capital never got a new mark. So if you actually knew what some of these private software companies were worth in 2022, like you wouldn't have so many problems in private credit because because they would have been properly remarked, and any lending against them would be based on, wow, I'm watching TV right now, and Crusoe. Crusoe has an advertisement with Chase Lockmiller, the CEO, smiling at the end of it on national television. That's interesting. Yeah, AI data centers are coming, guys. But listen, on private credit, so there's nothing there that's going to blow up the entire economy, because a lot of the most important assets in the world are publicly traded, and they're getting a new mark every day. some assets like Bitcoin are getting a new mark every second. It's the assets that where you're hiding things because you don't have to take a new mark and you're estimating the mark or you're just using the last one where these issues could come up. So where does that affect people if they are heavily exposed to private equities, particularly private equities in industries that would have re-rated if they were publicly traded but haven't, which is why you hear everybody talking about software. and technology in particular, because that's the part of the market that got sort of crushed in 2022, but never necessarily got rerated. And there was a lot of lending done to those companies. And now people are not just worried about the valuations, they're also worried about AI as a fundamental disruptor to the business model. So you imagine you have a cash flow obligation to service debt, and then you're not sure about the underlying business, whether the business is going to be able to continue to generate. the same amount of cash flow that was required. All that said, like, yes, Blue Owl is more effective. I mean, their stock price is just trading where it was in 2023, right? It's down, but it's only down whatever, 35 something percent for the year, which is pretty standard for like a lot of small cap stocks. And again, Blue Owl, you can call it Blue Owl what you want. It's a small mid-cap type of company, right? Like a lot of them have been down 30 to 50%. like pretty much in the first six months of every single year for the past three years. Like they were down in 2024, they were down in 2025, they were down in 2026, and by the end of the year, they were up. There are structural issues there. Blue Owl is primarily, right, like their business is very heavily tilted towards private credit, but like Morgan Stanley's isn't it, right? Goldman Sachs isn't. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, right? People are like, oh, BlackRock had to close the fund. It's like 0.001% of their AUM. So yeah, there's going to be some things that need to be fixed. But there's no reason why those things have to become a contagion. That's where I disagree. And this is basically the talk track of every single doomer in Bitcoin spaces over the last three years was take anything they've never heard of before that they read about today for the first time in the Wall Street Journal and then extrapolate that into a global contagion that crushes all asset prices. That is the standard playbook for a lot of these guys. None of them are probably very successful because using that type of methodology and approach is going to leave you much poorer than if you basically ignore the vast majority of the headlines most of the time and just focus on When do the assets that I really understand get into my buying window? That's it. You can basically ignore almost everything else because in the process of rerating from when you know something is in your buying window to when it's fully rerated, there's going to be dozens and dozens of things that sound like they're bad for the market or bad for the economy or bad for politics or bad for whatever. And at the end analysis, they will have very little impact. on your positions as long as you bought them correctly and you were right about the thesis. So I'm not saying private credit is a nothing burger. I've understood the issues with privately held assets for many, many years because I do private market investing and most of the people in these spaces who throw out the terminology private credit have never even invested in a hedge fund. They've never invested in private equity. They've never done a private equity turnaround, right? So they're largely talking out of their ***. They have no direct experience. They can't tell you from the ground up what any of this actually means, because they've never actually done a private deal before. I've done tons of private deals, and you learn every single one, and at some point, you realize a lot of it's the same. And it's the same thing in public markets. If you buy at good prices, you don't have that much to worry about. If you buy or use leverage at bad prices, then you always have something to worry about. In public markets, when you buy at bad prices and use leverage, you get punished right away, because the market tends to victimize people in the very short term, because it's very liquid. There's a lot of really, really savvy players and really like high-powered firms trading, and they're looking to victimize people that are out of position. Like when the market sniffs weakness, it tends to exploit it. Public markets are a little bit more slow. They're a little bit more like a small town versus a big city, where idiots can survive for a long time because there's no mark to market. So they can keep raising more money in their funds because the investors don't even know what the underlying assets are worth, because they keep marking them to fiction for year after year after year. They show a decent return, they raise another fund, and they hope to go swing on something else, and hope the investors forget that in their previous fund, that years later, they had to mark down a bunch of stuff after the fact, right? Because there was no accounting requirement that they marked some of those things. So they just, they didn't take a markdown, even though anyone who was like in the boardroom and those businesses would have known that those businesses were less valuable. And therefore, they were less creditworthy. And you shouldn't be lending them more money. But of course, if you're sitting on the equity and the debt side, there are incentives for you to provide debt that you might not otherwise have. Because if you own the debt, too, then maybe if the equity fails, you can still restructure the company and keep on going down the road and roll it forward. Some of this stuff is a timing thing. So if you're a fund, and you're trying to raise your next fund, You know that this thing needs a 60% markdown, but you're not gonna take it until you finish raising your next fund, and then you're gonna take it. So you're gonna share the bad news and not risk the fundraising effort on that second fund, or that third fund, or the fund that's an add-on to the previous fund. So there's a lot of this nonsense and noise going on, but again, if you own well-priced, publicly traded liquid assets, those assets are probably going to price in more quickly everything that could be known about those businesses. If the market wants to throw a tizzy for a 5% or 10% correction like they just did over the Serran thing, because private credit is in the news three months from now or six months from now, that's possible. But again, if you own the right public companies, it's just another buying opportunity because it has nothing to do with the quality or the value of your company. It's just another reason for people to be afraid. And people who go around spending their whole investing career being afraid of everything, never make any money. It's really that simple. It's quite dumb, like when you think about it clearly, but I get it. When you see the numbers, the red numbers on the screen, it's very easy to think that something has changed. But I don't think, like as a percentage of the economy, as a percentage of the credit markets, right, PE as a percentage of bad, like PE that's gone bad as a percentage of all equity values, I mean, they're all quite small. So I'm not saying there won't be narrative noise and potential follow on implications in the very short term for some sectors or valuations, right? Like that. That's always possible. But when you look out two or three years, I don't think it's going to have any impact on publicly traded companies like in something like AI data centers, where the availability of capital is is about as good as it gets right now. There's so much good capital available and the cost of capital is coming down. So while everybody's saying, oh, private credit's so bad, what you're seeing in the real market is good companies that are publicly traded, that are transparent, are able to still get capital at good rates. And you can imagine what will happen if the new Fed chair comes in and is much more dovish. Like we could have a two or three-year, like unbelievable environment for fundraising for large infrastructure projects. And we could see interest rates that you can't imagine. right now. We've already seen-- if you're in Bitcoin mining, you've already seen effective cost of capitals drop from mid to high teens, maybe even low 20s, now into the 5% or 6% range. Like you can get large scale debt against the fully leased out AI data center, where you may have had to float it at 7%, but it's trading at 6% or lower now. If you're one of the best players and you have good relationships with capital providers and banks, so But I don't think I don't think anything private credit is going to impact the build out of AI. I think if anything, there's going to be new players coming in and larger folks that want to participate in some of these financing rounds.

Small Cap Snipa: AI guys, you got your hand up, brother. What do you got for us?

BitcoinAIGuy: Yeah, just back to price action, right? Like Mike said, you know, those that have announced deals like Coreweave, and nubious, right? I mean, the stocks are pumping, but I've seen this before and the nubious bulls like to make fun of me because I like Bitcoin and Bitcoin miners and Bitcoin mining stocks. But this isn't my first, you know, cycle with these equities, right? I mean, I was here in 2020, right? I wasn't just buying the bottom in 2022. And I vividly remember-- I didn't buy a Marathon or ride at a dollar. I bought a Marathon closer to $6 in 2020. But it's the same deal. But instead of signing-- Bitcoin has no customers, right? But back in 2020 of January, Bitcoin was like $8,000, and it pumped to $60,000, $69,000. like two years later, right? In Marathon Riot, the kings of last cycle, they're both stocks that were a dollar. And a year and some change later, right, the stocks went up 75 to 80x. And they barely had any operating exahash. They had like a gigawatt or two. And the stocks were in the '70s and '80s at the peak, right? And looking at that valuation compared to today, none of it made sense, right? So just because a stock is pumping doesn't mean the current winners are going to stay winners, right? I mean, of course, 2022 was a terrible year. The sector went down. A lot of them, a lot of the, even the winners, right, of today, they went down 90%, 99%. Coreweave went bankrupt. Argo blockchain went to essentially zero. You know, Iron, Cypher, et cetera, CleanSpark, they all went down, Hut, right? They all went down like 90%. And that was not an easy thing to stomach if you were, you know, an investor, right? If you didn't sell the top, it was very difficult to go through that. But like, you know, these crazy gains are what attracted me to buy the bottoms of 22 because I knew Bitcoin had more in it, right? I suspected that it was going to go to 100,000 and beyond, right? So buying the companies that had operational leverage, I thought was a no brainer and it was not a popular idea in 2022. Right now with AI. Right. I mean, it's just it's a it's a cleaner story because the margins are better, you know, and everyone's talking about it like, you know, this demand is unreal, right? You don't have to listen to, you know, 200 hours of a Michael Saylor podcast to understand this thing, right? It's and banks want to lend against this idea, right? Because the margins are there and the type of clients that are paying for these services are the leading companies and have the best credit ratings, right? Like it is just a good idea. I saw someone posted a mining mafia today. He was like, mining mafia has absolutely 0 posts on Bitcoin mining nowadays. And I responded, I was like, dude, I'm focused on. making money. Like, yeah, I love Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin's a great idea. But I'm also an equity investor, and my goal is to multiply my Bitcoin purchasing power. Like, how am I going to do that? I'm not married to mining Bitcoin at a loss, right? I mean, I'm not, I'm not going to name any names, but I'm focused on making money. Right. And I think the ideas that we share in this community, I think, are super valuable. And a ton of people have gotten rich from it. Right. And I think it's still early to this AI supercycle. And the fact that mining mafia-- we get two bull markets back-to-back. We had this Bitcoin. you know, run, right? I mean, that was amazing, right? And now, you know, yeah, sure, we had to draw down, six months, whatever, but now we got this AI, you know, super cycle, it's heating up and the fundamentals have never looked better, right? And, I think this is just an incredible time. It's really like once you truly do your homework, and understand this. You don't need to be a finance expert to understand it. But once you get the basics, it's hard to be bearish, right? And I think your title is very accurate. It is early, and we are in AI super psych. We're still going to talk about Bitcoin, right? But it's not going to be the thing that pays us the most, the quickest, right? I think it's, you know, using proof of work, right? You could, a business that can earn a ton of profits at scale will help the investor buy the things that they want. And that's, for me at least, it's still Bitcoin, right? So I think, you know, It is a little different, but I think the opportunity is, I think it's a once in a lifetime opportunity, right, for the entire sector. And of course, the alpha is picking the winners and losers, and that's where the game is. But I still think even if you don't pick the number one and number two and number three, there's still an opportunity to get a four or five X within three, four years. So that's where my head's at.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, I mean, I think you make great points. Speaking of Bitcoin, I'm just looking at the chart right now, the monthly chart. This is starting to look more of like I mean, this is looking like a really strong local bottom, if you want to call it even a local bottom. You know, we had, speaking of just doom and fear, there were, like there's been lots of price targets thrown around on this app, whether to the upside or the downside. There's been some 40K, 45K. is the area. And then there's-- I'm sure some of us have heard two decimals, right? Like 10K, under 10K. I think that that's pretty wild. Like, if Bitcoin gets down to 40K, I mean, I'm not waiting until it gets down to 10K. Like, I'm purchasing a lot of Bitcoin at 40K. I mean, I posted about some of the ads that I made on February 5, whenever it was, at 61, 63, 65 as well. But nonetheless, just the strength here, it's, I mean, we're starting to see it. If you zoom out and just look on a monthly time frame, there haven't been a lot of times where Bitcoin has consolidated and after a massive downtrend, right, like a 50% down move where we kind of stick to a range and consolidate the way we have over 2 months and trend lower. It hasn't happened too much after this this 50% drawdown. I mean, I know a lot of people, I'm sure you guys see it on the app, you know, Bitcoin is poised for a 75% drawdown, right? Like we got to wait for that 75%. I think that the one thing that the market has shown us is that you can't always clear cut 100% depend on history to repeat itself, right? So, Mike, I saw Couple of months ago, you made some Bitcoin ads for your daughter. I think it was like 69K. I can't remember exactly what it was. I was wondering if you've dabbled in it a little bit recently or if you're looking at it through possible other proxies. I know that Strive is a pretty cool position that you have. Just wondering your thoughts on Bitcoin.

Mike Alfred: I don't think anything has changed. Personally, I think this is as sound today as it's ever been.

Small Cap Snipa: Is 315 the number?

Mike Alfred: I just chose that at 16 as a likely target for a full cycle completion move, but I don't think we've seen anything like that yet. So look, the question's always going to be, if you take a 20% or more drawdown, is that the end of the cycle? Because in equities, a classical equity tactician might say, Well, anytime you go down more than 20%, that's a bear market. So then you got to start a new cycle. Well, I'm not sure Bitcoin had a cycle, but it appears to have had a 50% slightly over 50% drawdown within still maybe the early innings of a lot of a longer an elongated cycle, which would obviously be elongated by forces that we've never seen before. I think a lot of people sort of naively overlying previous cycles not realizing that when the market structure changes this much, that you really can't use fractals. You really can't use any of these previous time periods as perfect analogies. We didn't have ETFs, right? We didn't have treasury companies, like not at this scale. We still have macro and we have macro headwinds. We've had macro headwinds, depending on how you look at it, basically since 2022. You could argue there hasn't been enough liquidity and therefore the economic cycle hasn't really been able to play out. But that has nothing to do with Bitcoin. So like you have to separate what's external to Bitcoin from what's internal to Bitcoin. I think there's nothing wrong with Bitcoin's internals. I think Bitcoin's doing more or less exactly what I want it to do. I still think it's tracking towards a long-term price of a million, 2 million, 3 million, something like that. I don't know how long it'll take. It probably today to most people seems like it'll never come. But in my experience, when assets with the explosiveness that Bitcoin sort of has inside of it, when the assets appear to be dead or appear like they can't do something is when they're actually more likely to do it. So people were really excited in 2021 and talking about million dollars because in 2021, we'd gone up enough off the bottom. We'd gone from 3000 ish in COVID Right? Like when that huge drawdown day where we went from like 78k to basically topped out just very briefly in the high threes, fours area, we went from there to almost 70k. People forget this. It's like 18 months. So Bitcoin did that as recently as four years ago, five years ago. Right? And then since then, since then, it's basically more or less flat. Right? It's trading at 75 right now, and it was almost 70. in the fall of 2021. And so in 2021, people incorrectly at the time maybe extrapolated similar returns in the near future out into the future, and that ended up being wrong. And today, people are going to do the exact opposite. They're going to extrapolate significantly lower returns out in the future because that's what happened in the recent past. And with an asset like Bitcoin, they're probably just going to consistently be wrong over time, which is why, even though I like to play the sport of trying to figure out what it's going to do, because it's fun, I never trade around that, right? Like, I don't trade around trying to catch a slightly lower low or trim just because it went up a lot, because I just don't think you can do that very well with Bitcoin. Anyone who says Bitcoin follows classical charting too. I've heard that BS millions of times. Bitcoin's violated what the classical charters have said like a dozen times already since 2023. Multiple times I was told Bitcoin couldn't go higher at much lower prices even than where we are now. And then those folks come out later and say, well, see, I told you it was going to go down at 120. It's like, yeah, but who cares? You got everybody out of Bitcoin at 20. And you had everybody out at 25, and you had everybody out at 38. So why would we care if you're bearish now? You've been bearish on and off like three, four times a year every year. So my view is that Bitcoin is the one asset that you can hold without paying a lot of attention to it. If you own stocks, if you're invested in companies, and you're really involved in those companies, and you have a lot of your net worth exposed to those companies, and you really need to Make sure you understand the management team. You make sure you understand the strategy. You have to make sure you understand the balance sheet. You have to track those things over time, the execution of the business to make sure your thesis is still correct. Bitcoin's a decentralized, immutable ledger, right? It's one of the most interesting and unique ways of organizing human behavior that's ever been created in human history. There's really nothing else like it. It's sort of like how AI is the only self-improving large scale technology in all of human history, which makes it really interesting, right? Because it can make itself significantly better without human intervention. Bitcoin doesn't necessarily make itself better, but it continues to operate day-to-day without a significant amount of human intervention, which is a similar sort of improvement in the way human societies work. So I like both of them for different reasons. I think they will in the long run play off of each other, but I think AI has stolen a bit of the mindshare and capital flows. or the cycle from Bitcoin. But I suspect that will flip and or that at some point AI's dominance will actually positively impact Bitcoin as people realize that Bitcoin is not a software company, that AI does not disrupt Bitcoin. And even better than that, AI prefers Bitcoin to other stores of value. AI is not dumb. AI is actually going to be the smartest living organism on the planet. And so if AI, as smart as we think it is, then at some point it will converge on Bitcoin as an intelligent place to store capital. So a lot of what you see in the short term is just price action. It turns out even people who claim that they're really fundamentally oriented, they still need a job. They still need to get paid. And so when they can be paid to do Bitcoin podcasts because the market is up, they'll do that. But when no one wants to watch their podcast because Bitcoin is down, well, then they're going to pivot. out and do something else. So then they do a generalist podcast or they get a job or whatever. As a long duration investor, though, I tend to follow these trends over 10, 15, 20 plus years. I think we got a 20 or 30 year run ahead of us, a steep run in both Bitcoin and AI. And I intend on closely tracking these developments basically for the remainder of my productive life. So to me, like nothing that's happening right now is abnormal. I've seen this play out in the internet. In 2001, two, three, like you couldn't find any signs of life in the internet industry. Like you would have thought like nobody was still open and everything was dead, but yet everybody was using the internet more and more every day, even though the internet stocks didn't really come out of their depression for a while, right? It wasn't until 2006, 2007, you started to think, oh, okay, maybe Maybe Google and Amazon and Apple, these are good investments. And then you ran smack into the Great Recession, and you took a 50% or 80% drawdown. It's very, very reminiscent of what's happening in this space, where you have a macro-driven drawdown, which had nothing to do with the long-term fundamental adoption of the thing itself. And so I've seen this before. You can have up to three, four, or five-year periods where even though everything looks good fundamentally, the prices don't aren't impacted. And with the dot com bubble, because it was so extreme relative to the size of the economy and relative to where interest rates were, et cetera, like it took many, many years to digest that. In some cases, you had companies that never made new all time highs that are around in 2000 for 10 or 15 years, even though their earnings and their revenue went up pretty consistently. Companies like Microsoft, people forget that they most people who own Microsoft or most people are interested Microsoft today, like they came into the market during COVID. So they don't really understand the history and understand how normal it is to have long periods where assets seemingly are underperforming. But ultimately, fundamentals win, which is why I largely ignore charts, because charts won't tell you that. They'll just tell you in the very short term what recently happened. And then you can try to extrapolate that. But it's not going to tell you where we're going to end up in three, 5, 10 years from now. You have to think a little bit more deeply about what's actually happening. You have to understand the nature of the thing that you own and that you're invested in. And then you need to give it enough time for it to actually work. And that's one of the issues I have with X, in particular, is it tends to glorify charting and very short-term oriented thinking around stocks and markets. And there's no real big money in that. Again, I've said this before, you can bifurcate it. On one side, you got Citadel and Millennium and Virtu, High Frequency, Quant, XTX, Jane Street, et cetera. If that's your primary business, you can make a lot of money basically victimizing retail investors 'cause they're just not smart enough to realize that they're being victimized. That's one type of business, but if you're just like a normal person on X posting charts, thinking you're competing with Jane Street, you're not. The only way you can actually compete with those firms and win bigger long term is to do what Warren Buffett did, which is to just buy really high quality assets and hold them and let them compound, right? And not pay taxes constantly and not pay transaction costs constantly and not constantly being forced into a situation where you have to choose. You have to make more and more decisions. The more decisions you have to make as a human, the less likely you are to be correct. An AI algorithm can maybe be correct more often because it's programmed to do that. You and I are not programmed to do that. So the more decisions you have to make based on noise and charts and things like that macro, like the less likely you are to be successful. So yeah, my high level view is Bitcoin is one of the most important megatrends of our lifetime. If you're under the age of 40 in particular, like it would be absolutely foolish in my opinion not to have at least, I don't know, 10, 15, 20% of your portfolio exposed to it because it's one of the only things that doesn't have idiosyncratic company-specific risk. You can index, but if you index, you'll get index returns. Bitcoin has smoked index returns. It probably will continue on a forward-looking basis to smoke, particularly like the S&P because the S&P is already, I'm not saying it's overvalued necessarily, but it's not undervalued enough to generate anything exceptional. Like people expect 10% from the S&P, but don't be surprised if over one of these decades, starting this year, last year, the year before, next year, that it's more like 3% or 5%. And that may be fine for some people, but if you want to get wealthy, you actually need to invest in things that can perform a little bit better than that. Inclusive of things like we talk about in here, the whole reason why you buy small cap equities is because they have the potential to significantly outperform large cap equities and particular index equities where you have a whole bunch of stocks in there that are not necessarily undervalued. Right. So anyway, I think I've said enough on that.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah. You know, as far as like the Bitcoin and kind of playing off of AI in the future, I you know, Dan Roberts, a CEO that like a lot of us know of, he like a common pretty popular quote was that. it's pretty indisputable that we're heading deeper and deeper into the cloud and just the digitization of humanity, of civilization, right? Every every thought and transaction and memory is like shifting from atoms to bits and dirt to data centers. So it's AI is definitely not a tool anymore. It's it's how the world is it's the nervous system of the world, right? And it's accelerating and optimizing everything. And when that digital layer fully matures, there's going to need to be like a trusted financial layer to it, too. So I think it makes sense that Bitcoin could definitely play off of it in a way where it's like that missing, you know, financial backbone that you can't like break or program, you know, just borderless and sovereign. So I think it definitely is neutral. It is important that like we somehow have like a financial layer that's neutral and incorruptible to an extent. I mean, I don't want to say to an extent, but incorruptible despite whatever, to bring up the doomers again, it was, it used to be the 51% miners attack and then now it's quantum. But again, when you kind of zoom out from just like a realistic perspective, Whether or not, you know, when you say that it is years away, whether it's 10, 15, 20 years away of anything like that being possible or being real, just like put, let's be realistic with it, right? Like the amount of energy or not even energy, like the amount of equipment and just energy that you would need to pull something off like that is billions of dollars every day and then let alone like, Is that equipment and hardware? Does it even exist? I don't. I personally don't think it does. But again, it's all just like theory and and fiction. Lev, I see got a new new speaker on the panel. Lev, if you got anything, you're more than welcome to share.

BitcoinAIGuy: Am I up here?

Small Cap Snipa: Yes, you are, my friend. You are up here. Oh, hey, man. Yo, I must have fat fingered that, but I appreciate all you guys, man. I've been following Bitcoin AI guy forever, Mike forever. I didn't get in as early as a lot of you guys, and I increased my stack in like the 60s because I thought we were going straight to 100, but I've weathered the storm and I'm here for the long haul. So thank you all, man. I'm a Bitcoiner. I just kind of fell into iron after like following Mike and Bitcoin mining stock AI guy for years. So I appreciate all the knowledge and I'm here, man, and I see good things on the horizon. Appreciate you guys. Yeah, man, thanks for joining. Appreciate the kind words. I don't know if anyone else wants to wants to talk. Bitcoin. I got you got a couple, couple of fans and some nice words.

BitcoinAIGuy: Well, he said he wasn't as early as us, but the title is the title. It is early. And Mike will tell you nothing has happened yet. So, dude, like, chill out. Like, I think you got to. take a breather and keep compounding your gains, right? You don't need to be tricking.

Small Cap Snipa: McNally money or Mike, go for it.

Mike Alfred: Yeah, I just want to say it's absolutely early for the sector and for the broader trend. If you're young, you've got 20 or 30 years at least to invest in some of this stuff. And people tend to think that the way the world is today is the way it's always been. It's hard to realize how much things have changed because we've become so accustomed as humans to the things we have. So imagining, for example, like if you're in your 30s or 20s, imagining a world before ubiquitous high-speed internet is hard. But people used to actually have to know where they were driving. You would order pizza on the phone and you would give them directions. You'd be like left on Main Street and then right on first and then a quick left on, like literally you'd give directions to your pizza driver. You go visit a friend's house for the first time, they would give you directions and you'd write them down. It's just wild to think about, but the world is probably gonna accelerate more in the next five years than it did in the previous 20. And the previous 20 are pretty wild if you actually were old enough to understand how much things have changed. And you have, look, there are people that are old enough, but they're not smart enough to pay attention to context. So they were there, but they don't really think deeply about how many things have changed since the late 90s, for example, till now. And then there are people who are just too young. They can imagine it. They've read about it, but they've never experienced it. viscerally where like like they've seen what it's like in a world without the Internet or mobile phones. So AI and Bitcoin and things like that, these exponential style technologies have a tendency to kind of sneak up on you because you hear people talking about them and then you blink and all of a sudden it's everywhere. And then at some point, if you don't use it, you're completely at a disadvantage. You're like completely uncompetitive relative to somebody who is using it. And you're seeing that now. Like it's accelerating now where for certain professions, if you don't know how to use Claude, like you're not gonna be able to get a job in six months. There are certain types of jobs already where if you're, you know, entry level or junior, like they just don't exist really. Because it turns out that all these just, you know, these are like 1990s, late 1990s version of the internet companies, right? Like versions of AI, they're not even really as advanced as we're going to be in three to five years. And they're already capable of taking jobs from a big chunk of the job market. And I think eventually pretty much everybody, I'm honest, right? Like pretty much everybody will experience some disruption from this. And the question is just how well do you position yourself, right? And when I say yourself, I mean your family and people around you. Do you make the correct investments to take advantage of it? Do you continue building capital? Do you use how to do you learn how to use some of these things as like a copilot in any job where probably the best answer is actually a human combined with a machine, right? Like a human driver combined with you know, Tesla self-driving or a human software developer pair coding with a bunch of cloud agents, right? Like there's going to be a bunch of iterations of that. There's going to be a bunch of things that change as people figure out what the right combo is. But I'm pretty bullish on all of it, even though it seems scary today. Almost everything that we use today seems scary to someone previously And even though AI is potentially a significant paradigm shift relative to some of those earlier technologies, I have a feeling that there'll still be a place for humans in the system over time. And it'll just be a question of figuring out where humans can actually continue to thrive. There's no reason to have humans typewriting, right? Like secretaries used a typewriter in a physical piece of paper and then put a letter in the mail to some guy across Midtown. from you because that was the easiest way to get the information to them. Now you don't need an assistant to do that because you can just spend literally 15 seconds writing the e-mail and press send and it's instant. You know, a lot of secretaries probably thought, oh, my job is really going to be threatened by the word processor and then and then the Internet and everything. But the reality is the people who used to be able to do that are now doing something different and hopefully in some cases something better. So I think that's more or less the way this is going to go. I think a lot of people should be nervous right now because in the early stages of disruption, it's going to just wipe out a lot of jobs and cause a lot of people to have to do something different. But as we figure out what the real long-term implications are, I also think there's going to be a tremendous amount of opportunity. And when you look back 20 or 30 years from now, it'll be obvious that even today, there are a lot of people doing things that are super manual that really a human shouldn't do because It's honestly boring grunt work and the companies that are spending money for a human to do it are overpaying and the people who are doing it are actually having a lower quality of life than if a machine did it. And then we just need to figure out how to make sure those people have another way of generating economic value. And that's just the question that we have to answer.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, you talk about 20 to 30 years from now. I can't even imagine what the world is going to look like 20 to 30 years from now across all sectors and industries. I mean, if you look 20 to 30 years ago, right, like just take transportation for an example's sake, like who in their right minds 20, 30 years ago could imagine, maybe not electric vehicles, but like fully autonomous vehicles, right? I think that that's the perfect example. Thousands and like for thousands of years, we were walking in on horse and carriage or utilizing animals, right, to take us where we need to go. And then the first automobiles came in with gas engines and faster, more powerful. Now we got the electric vehicles and very soon, I mean, not even very soon, like now we're seeing it. Waymo and different, even, you know, the Cybertruck, different cars are literally driving themselves. Like, we're not driving. We're heading fully towards autonomous in every single sector and industry. And the same revelation is happening in the skies. I don't know if people follow aviation, but we went from-- I mean, we're going from traditional helicopters, which helicopters are always going to exist. There's going to be a specific group of people who won't get in like an eVTOL. But anyways, we're going from helicopters to now like these very sleek electric vertical takeoff and landing aircrafts. They're called the eVTOLs. That's the acronym. They're tested, certified, designed to fly extremely quietly and efficiently over cities. And like the Next Leap is even bigger, right? It's again, fully autonomous aircrafts that take off, they navigate, they land themselves without a pilot on board. And it's kind of just like a reality, efficiency, increasing efficiency, increasing productivity across every single layer. You got transportation, which is a huge one. And again, like the foundational layer of it is the AI, is the computing, the infrastructure. We're seeing the robotics come into it too now. So it's not like we're not just, the world isn't just changing. It's like accelerating very fast and transforming and happening faster because of like the computing power and just the just the sheer like acceleration in AI and again, computing power that we just have. McNally Money, I see we got you on the panel, man. I've I don't think I've ever seen you on spaces before. How you doing, bro?

Frans Bakker: Doing good, boys.

Small Cap Snipa: I just got out of my EV tall down to Scottsdale here. Yeah, and I thought I'd tune in.

BitcoinAIGuy: Mike, always great to get your thoughts.

Frans Bakker: My question is.

Small Cap Snipa: Jonathan Gibbs just left Riot today.

BitcoinAIGuy: I don't think you have a big exposure to Riot, but I wanted to ask as a board member, how important is a single individual?

Small Cap Snipa: They made a big point of him joining the company. They had a whole slide presentation about him. He's now left. Do you think that impacts a company overall or is it more than one person on a team? What are your thoughts there? McNally, I got some unfortunate news. I think it literally looks like just as you started asking your question, Mike, or right before you asked your question, Mike dropped off. I don't know if he'll join back. That's all right. That could be a question of the group. I'm a big advocate of riot, but that's obviously a big hit today. So what do you guys think? I'd love for Bitcoin AI guy to.

BitcoinAIGuy: Do we know if he got fired or did he leave? Because I think he, you know, I think his incentive package was like 19. Million dollars in options, right? So that's like, I'll have to.

Small Cap Snipa: That's how we found out.

Frans Bakker: Yeah, we saw the Form Four and I think he gave those up.

Small Cap Snipa: So I would imagine maybe somebody else poached them, but I'm not sure.

BitcoinAIGuy: I mean, who's paying that much, right? Like, I mean, it's not crazy, right? We see a lot of executive pay comps, right, that are ridiculous. in the Bitcoin mining space, but AI too, right? So I don't know, like, did he get, it isn't clear if he got, to me at least, if he got fired or...

Small Cap Snipa: But I guess either way, does it change the thesis?

Mike Alfred: Do you think one guy...

Small Cap Snipa: Can change the trajectory.

BitcoinAIGuy: Yeah, because when you hire a senior leader, you're hiring dozens of, they hire dozens and dozens of people, right? So, yeah, it's like, I don't know what he achieved in the short time you was there, but if he had brought in, you know, a lot of people with him, there's uncertainty, right? It's like, I only joined because He joined, right? Like he was my boss from two jobs ago and I really liked him. And if he's going back to Coreweave, I'm not saying he went to Coreweave, I have no idea, right? But just to throw out a company, if he goes at Coreweave, right, or somewhere else, you know, he might bring his the people we hired while he was at Riot, right? So that can cause delays. And then, you know, you got to hire, you have to have all these recruiters, you know, and look for talent again and start the whole process again. And then if you've promised AMD or other clients, you know, other things, it can cost you money, right? Because there could be penalties for not delivering on schedule. So Yeah, I mean, it is a big deal. So we need to see how they, you know, who they hire next. And it would be interesting to see where John goes. It's not typical that an employee walks away from that kind of incentive package. Yeah, I've heard some beer takes too. They're like, well, yeah, you know, it's easy to walk away from Riot. You know, their stock hasn't been performing. But no, like, you know, it doesn't matter what Riot did in the past. This is a new opportunity, right? You know, they might not be the best player, but they have a ton of great assets, you know, across their gigawatts and their manufacturing company, right? It is a huge opportunity to turn around that business and transform it with AI and all that. But if a senior leader who probably has a lot of eyes on him, not just from like potential employers, but like just people in the industry, they're like, well, what's going on over there? Right? So, you know, it's not a good look, but we don't know the full story. We're just speculating here. So I don't know. I don't know.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, no, that's a good take. And I see Ernie's in the speaker group here too. Question, do you think Mara or CleanSpark's a better buy right now if you were buying one?

Ernest Hamilton: Hey, Bryce. Well, you know, my obviously biased opinion on there would be CleanSpark. But I think really if you look at both their market caps, I think where the market's putting valuations Still on just Bitcoin mining, I think whether it's Mara getting a deal signed or, working with their third party to kind of start to get some deals signed and get some of their contracted power locked up or it's clean spark. I think you're going to see both of the company's market caps kind of shifting as they get to the HPC AI valuation mode. The question is which one's going to, you know, have something come up first. I mean, honestly, I think either of them From evaluation standpoint, I have some good opportunities here. It's really going to depend on execution on signing that first lease.

Small Cap Snipa: McNally, you got anyone else in the pipeline? Who are you? What's your schedule like as far as, you know, CEOs coming on or what's it looking like for the next month or two? Yeah, I know everyone's upset about Iron and so are we.

Frans Bakker: Had lunch with them in New York and they.

Small Cap Snipa: Basically said rather than doing back-to-back interviews, we'd like to spread it out. So we're hoping mid-quarter, but that didn't happen.

Ernest Hamilton: So I'm hoping to get them on.

Small Cap Snipa: Obviously, we're going to have Q1 earnings coming out, mostly starting to see some HBCAI revenue. So we're looking forward to that right now.

Frans Bakker: We've got Bitcoin Conference, I think in a week and a half, so that'll be good.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, right now another.

Frans Bakker: Question I guess I have for the group on Terra Wolf, and sorry if you guys already talked about this.

Ernest Hamilton: But an interesting move today.

Frans Bakker: Normally they announced a deal, then they raised money.

Small Cap Snipa: Now they went out.

Frans Bakker: Paul Prager's interview on Power Lunch was awesome.

Small Cap Snipa: Why'd you guys sell shares?

Frans Bakker: Because we could. I just wanted to get your thoughts there. I think Hawesville's pretty close.

Mike Alfred: They said once they bought that site, they had two term sheets, like basically immediately.

Small Cap Snipa: How are we feeling about Wolf?

Ernest Hamilton: I think that there's a lot of good opportunity there. I think obviously when the convertible, yeah, when it was an ATM, wasn't a convertible, right, that got put out there.

Small Cap Snipa: Not an ATM, no.

₿itcoin ₿utcher: It was OK.

Ernest Hamilton: That's 19, yeah, $19.00 per share. Never mind. It's all kind of priced out there. So my bad there. But yeah, I think obviously people reacted negatively when the news first came out. But I think that with that, they put out exactly what the proceeds were and it's that what the Kentucky site, they're going to basically use that to help. build that out for HPC. I think there's a lot of valuation that will continue to stack with Terwolf. I think the biggest part, Bryson, you were talking about how revenue will start to come up in these quarterly earnings and moving forward is really going to be the execution side, right? We're seeing a lot of companies sign the leases. It's going to be really critical to see which ones are able to hold their deadlines because I think that's going to give them the right reputation to be able to continue signing leases moving forward.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, we talked a little bit about kind of just the funding side of things for these neoclouds, these infrastructure providers. Obviously, look, at first glance, you're going to see the stock drop and see it as dilution. But if you zoom out, I think especially done at these levels and depending on how it's executed, it's a positive move for long-term positioning. So As Ernest was saying, a lot of it is to fund that Kentucky campus, right, 480 megawatts, and also repaying, I believe it was like a $500 million bridge credit facility in full. So it's going to help support future site acquisitions and just like general corporate purposes. I'm not worried about that. at this particular moment. And I actually think that we're going to start seeing a little bit more of that around even some of the larger so-called neoclouds and providers in the space, just as you start to, as utilization starts to ramp and capital is needed. I think it just makes sense. Now, small cap, you put out some great content and I really like it. Who are your top picks right now? I mean, my top picks, I mean, I'm at my 3 biggest positions here for just in the sector is Iron Cipher and Terra Wolf. I have a little bit of, I bought this so long ago. I have a little, like, I never even really talk about it because it's such a small position, but I wouldn't mind Kiel, Kiel Infrastructure, the new rebrand. going up either. But no, it's, for me, it's really all about Iron Cipher and TerraWolf. And I, mean, I'm, big on, you know, Coreweave and Nibius too. I don't, I just think that the companies with, that have shown that whether or not they can actually deliver, right, the compute on time and raise capital effectively, but the ones who are clearly leading the way with respect to deals with hyperscalers and just, continued CapEx investment and building out their infrastructure are going to win. And I think that that's kind of what we're seeing with those, you know, five names that I provided.

Frans Bakker: Yeah, and I'll just keep asking questions till you guys tell me to stop. But what's your thoughts on CSP versus Cola?

Small Cap Snipa: Oh, man, I, you know, Butcher kind of I urge you to listen to the recording of this, because Butcher just went nuts on this earlier. I think that, obviously, the margins for co-location are-- you're not going to get what you get with traditional cloud. But I think it really just depends on the company. It depends on how much your balance sheet needs de-risking and what infrastructure you're providing. I think that the companies that are that are taking the risk on really getting into those cloud plays and CSP. They obviously have a much higher debt load and it's riskier, but man, the reward is, it really could be through the roof. Ernest was kind of, I don't know if Ernest, you have thoughts on it either. We were talking about that with Butcher. Or maybe that was when we were talking about, the long-term leases versus?

Ernest Hamilton: We were, we were talking about, right? we're, we're talking about that just really quick to go back. I realize it's for the Terra Wolf wasn't ATM, wasn't convertible, it was just the plain equity offering. So that's good news. There's no, there should be no short hedging on convertibles. There, or anything else like that, and they're obviously using a good chunk to pay off that loan that means no interest there, so that's awesome, but going, going, going forward to what we're talking about now, I, like the co-location aspect just because, again, as I talked about it, you're building out these sites, you know, if you're doing a longer term lease agreements, then you're gonna be able to get better. Traditional, debt on refinancing, and you're gonna be able to continue to take that capital and kind of move it forward and continue to scale, more and more data centers with it. Also, you're like you mentioned, yes, maybe there's a little bit better returns being more of a CSP, but then you do have that risk factor, you know, of obsolescence on the hardware side of things. I guess you potentially could have a risk if you're in a co-location partnership with a chip provider and it's not the hyperscaler. If you're going with a third party, there could be some form of risk there as well. I think it's all going to come down into the terms and conditions and how these leases are really kind of lined out. I think it's going to be really critical looking at all that. But yeah, I still like a little less risk, maybe You believe you leave a little bit of money on the table, but it's going to be, you know, a more stable, continual growth forward, in my opinion. But, you know, what is a co-location company today, you know, in 10, 15 years, they could easily, you know, switch over to the CSP style, right? So there's definitely optionality there.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, real quick, I want to go to Jeffrey and then Shepherd, they just joined. Good to have you guys on. Jeffrey, how you doing, man? Hey, thanks.

BitcoinAIGuy: I had a quick follow-up with what McNally was asking a few moments ago, because.

Small Cap Snipa: I thought it was sort of interesting.

Mike Alfred: That Mike dropped off almost synchronously as McNally was asking about the riot executive leaving.

BitcoinAIGuy: Does that person fit at iron?

Mike Alfred: I mean, Mike's on the board of iron, so maybe he had to recuse himself from the whole conversation because he can't say anything.

Small Cap Snipa: I mean, I'll let someone. I'll go really quick. I'll let someone else speak. Honestly, I don't think that it has anything to do with it. I think that I actually was watching like the screen and I saw Mike drop off as I was like finishing up what I was saying. And then I went to okay. Yeah, but okay. I mean, who knows? We got a pack on right now, so...

Mike Alfred: Hey, guys, my daughter was standing. She's up way too late, and she was standing at her door hollering. And it turns out...

Frans Bakker: I thought you just don't like me, Mike.

Mike Alfred: It turns out that her bug bites are bothering us, so I sent my wife in with the bug bite cream. So that's what's happening in my house. Nothing serious, although I am watching the Warriors. Seems like an end of an era. Here, Curry just can't win a playoff game to save his life. But anyway, go ahead. Were you saying something about me and my daughter's bug bites, or were you saying I left for some other reason?

Small Cap Snipa: Superdad.

Mike Alfred: No, I was just trying to speculate about the riot executive's departure, which McNally was asking about before, and where that guy might be going because I don't even care. about companies that haven't done anything in AI yet. I don't even follow them really much anymore. There's too much to do with the companies who've actually done something in AI, just spend a lot of time in the companies who can't or haven't.

Ernest Hamilton: Jeff was trying to start a riot.

Mike Alfred: I didn't even know. I just, I mean, I noticed the stock underperforming pretty significantly. It was down more than Wolf most of the morning. And we know why Wolf was down. I didn't know. Do you think the riot stock reaction today was because of...

BitcoinAIGuy: This particular I do Mike and I it was down like 6% and I.

Small Cap Snipa: Think my question was as a board member can one guy move the price that much or do you think he would have had a team and there's backups or do you think this is potentially a bigger issue?

Mike Alfred: I think you're asking the wrong question. The thing that I've been talking about for a while is that most of these firms were never. set up to do AI in the 1st place. They're like two to three years behind the people who did. Right. Cypher started hiring AI related people like three years ago, four years ago. Iron's been thinking about AI since 2019. This whole narrative that they pivoted or something is complete BS. They were a purpose built, heavy duty data center developer that happened to use Bitcoin as an interesting monetization mechanism to bootstrap the infrastructure. They were not a Bitcoin miner. That's why they spent more, the big criticisms, they spent so much money on the data centers. It's like, yeah, because they're not designed to mine Bitcoin in a shipping container. Contrast that with the firms that are now claiming that they're pivoting into AI. They're either being dragged there by their boards because they've got activist investors in Rye's case, or by terrible performance for a long period of time, like it's market pressure. But they weren't, they were never proactive. They were paying themselves an ungodly amount of money, even as the shareholder returns have been absolutely horrid for most of these guys. So, I mean, it's basically been a management enrichment scheme, and it's something that I've been talking about for three years. I said at the bottom of the cycle, I said, some of these guys are running blatant management enrichment schemes. Just because you have A site that could be used from AI is not the same thing as actually having the sophistication and the skill set to actually deliver something in AI, right? And there's a big gap there. You talk to even the guys that are good at this and they'll tell you it's pretty hard. And even though guys that are good at it are still hiring more talent and trying to attract more talent because there's always going to be more things to learn and you're always going to need more capacity. I just never bought the narrative that just because somebody has a good site that they can do AI. I never bought that in the 1st place. I've always thought that people who were thinking deeply about AI for multiple years before they executed on their first agreement were more likely to win than people who were sort of forced into pivoting by shareholder activism or market pressures.

Small Cap Snipa: Shepherd, how you doing, man? Good to have you on the space.

Frans Bakker: Yeah, it's been a minute. Small cap, nice talking to you as well. The reason I decided to come up with a request, and I don't know if it's been discussed, and it's a level of, maybe you could see it as FUD, depending on how you see it, or bullish. I kind of see it as bullish in terms of the operating companies I'm investing in, but Maine, outline new data center development, I think is very bullish for the Texas Triangle. However, I don't want to go too deep into like Wolf or like Core Weave, but I think there's a level of complexity or even... price rearrangement now in terms of domestically here in the States for the data centers based on geographically what you have. We already kind of understood people get ****** *** at the cities and bringing up costs, but it seems like the more this kind of comes on, yes, there's this level of politicalization. You could have seen this at the forefront months and months ago, but it seems like it's coming more and more fruition. I was curious, anybody on the panel, if they took in any stock in that at all?

Small Cap Snipa: When you say, because you're talking about the main data center, regulatory, when you say take a new stock into it, what exactly are you referring to?

Frans Bakker: A synonym of taking brain power in terms of the calculations that you're doing for your investments. When it says like, for instance, Wolf has New York exposure, right? Like you could see that as a dampening for their Cayuga site and they have, they might do expansions in their site in the Great Lakes, right? Like that could be a risk factor or tax exposure. Just it seems from a politicalization point, whatever companies have a level of asymmetry in terms of risks in these certain states. I mean, personally, it makes me more bullish for the Texas Triangle. But if you're looking at Core Weave and Wolf, maybe there could be a level of repricing in terms of these other operating companies.

Small Cap Snipa: Gotcha. Yeah, I mean, I would completely agree with the first thing you said about the Texas Triangle. Look, every time that you have a state thrown-- and I think it was a very small power allocation, too, right? It was like 20 or 30 megawatts. is what the like the temporary ban was, is what they're considering new large data centers. So I think that every time that something like that happens, it just kind of tightens the supply more as just the demand is exploding. As far as like the the Northeast sector, right, like or the Northeast area like New York, Pennsylvania, there are a lot of, you know, data center build outs and just old power plants and whatever you want to call it, being kind of retrofitted and changed to support the needs of AI compute. I don't think, I didn't really see like what Maine did as a possible reason to get scared regarding like a Terra Wolf Lake Mariner data center in New York. You know, to my understanding, It's like a statewide temporary ban. Again, I haven't really done that much research into it. I did see it, and it seems-- I mean, I don't want to say get too political, but it seems a little kind of crazy to me. I mean, when I say temporary, right, it's like not-- temporary is I think it's like 18 months, 18 to 24 months, right, so that's still a long a long period of time, but I wouldn't jump the gun just yet and say, just as far as like the location demographic, that it could spread into other cities or states. I think that we're, you could definitely see that from like a local jurisdiction maybe, and some more of these activists really running with this thing and trying to get these new data centers canceled, right, or delayed. But the one thing that's important is it's new data centers, right? Like new. A lot of these companies already have their grid secured energy, their grid secured power, the infrastructure is, you know, has broken ground. So I haven't really thought too much of it, but I guess it's, you know, it is a it is a valid concern.

Mike Alfred: I wasn't aware that Maine mattered personally. I like Maine. I went to Portland, Maine once and ate them lobsters. It was really good. Drove over the hill from Mount Washington area. drop down into Portland and thought it was quite beautiful, but I was unaware that data centers were a big business. I thought it was mostly like lobster fishermen and like apple farmers and stuff. stuff, and some guys who run windmills and forestry. But anyway, there's a lot of anti-data center sentiment, but the reality is the data centers are going to be built. And look, it's not just data centers that left-wing people seem to be fighting so hard. They're fighting against all economic progress. It's the same brain damage and ideology that basically destroyed California and New York and Illinois, and it's causing wealthy people to immigrate in mass to states that treat them with more respect. I mean, California, in my opinion, is sowing the seeds for its own demise. Who in their right mind would start a business or buy real estate or try to build a data center in California? You'd have to be completely insane. So it really, like there's an ideological rift here between people who are forward thinking and interested in human progress and people who think that they can stop human progress. They're the same people, by the way. They're consuming energy. They're consuming a lot of energy and creating emissions, but as long as it's for them, it's okay. They just don't want anyone else to be able to create emissions or use energy. And if you point out the irony of that, they get all angry and then they just start marching and carrying signs. They don't actually, they're not actually interested in logic. They're not actually interested in rationality. They don't understand that everything that they consume and use as a modern citizen of a modern democracy would a lot of creature comforts that all those things were created by people who at various times in history would have been fought against by folks sharing their ideology today. Like all progress that we've experienced as humans is required energy and the usage of energy to do things that in a lot of cases humans used to do or didn't exist because they were either too energy intensive or required energy beyond human power in order to operate. So this is just another continuation of a very long line of things. I mean, there were Luddites who literally fought against very basic factory-style machinery because they were worried it was going to take their jobs. So it's kind of dumb, right? But either way, the people who are the loudest about this stuff tend to live on the coast. There isn't enough excess energy in those places to build out the data centers that are required. It needs to be done in the middle of the country where there is excess energy because there was a structural overbuild of renewables, and a lot of that power is stranded. Thankfully, those places are less populated than some of these places where a lot of the left-wing radicals in the U.S. live. And the power prices are lower there, the land prices are cheaper, there's more power, and they tend to be just coincidentally more right-leaning. So you may see some anti-data center sentiment in those places, but it's highly unlikely you'll see governments in mass turn against them. Like when I was in Texas, I met with a governor at this mansion in whatever it's called, something hollow, Sleepy Hollow or whatever, in Dallas. He was, he just, he wanted us to tell him like what else he could do for us. He's like, how do we help you do more? We want you to build more stuff in Texas. And so I'm glad it's Maine, right? Because Maine doesn't matter, right? Like great, like fighting against data centers is all you want, you don't matter. If you told me that Texas and Oklahoma said that they don't want any more data centers and that's new news as of today, then I'd be a little bit more concerned. But good luck with all the power and the forces that are behind these AI companies. They need these data centers to be built. Trump wants them to be built. The state governments in these states are not dumb. They know they're getting a huge windfall from both businesses coming there and individuals leaving these high cost, high tax, left-leaning states that no longer serve their interests. At a high level, I don't think any of this should be surprising, but also it really doesn't matter.

Small Cap Snipa: Jeffrey, I see you got your hand up.

Ernest Hamilton: Oh, yeah.

Small Cap Snipa: I'm kind of re-echoing what Mike just said, but.

BitcoinAIGuy: The first company I invested in was TerraWolf, and I always found it interesting that they had that.

Mike Alfred: Footprint in New York, which I thought was a very hostile place to start a Bitcoin mining company. I think they did a really good job of navigating the politics with Kathy Hochul. When they had their footprint in the nuclear power plant too as well, I think they were pretty good at staying one step ahead because when they relinquished or they sold their Bitcoin mining facility there, at first I was kind of disappointed and I thought, Oh, why are they doing that?

BitcoinAIGuy: But then.

Small Cap Snipa: That whole facility got tied up in legislation and complications related to the use of pre-grid pricing energy. I think that created a lot of problems with the community.

BitcoinAIGuy: That ended up putting a stop to...

Mike Alfred: Who was it that bought that place? Was it Amazon? Was it Amazon who bought that? There was a large Talent Energy had like a large data center there that they sold.

BitcoinAIGuy: I think they sold it to Amazon.

Mike Alfred: And then Amazon was picking up the idea of maybe turning the whole nuclear plant into something larger.

BitcoinAIGuy: But then I think that got stopped because of the pre-grid energy thing.

Mike Alfred: Does anybody remember that?

BitcoinAIGuy: I think it was Amazon.

Mike Alfred: Yeah, I think it was Amazon. But I think like, I think that the thing that.

BitcoinAIGuy: Sort of has gotten lost in some of the press narrative recently is Iron has a very big emphasis on that.

Small Cap Snipa: Terra Wolf's original footprint has a lot of.

BitcoinAIGuy: Emphasis on that, are these companies which have a larger reliance on the poorly utilized renewable energy sources?

Small Cap Snipa: The new, not yet realized clean energy source, nuclear power, is really far off.

Mike Alfred: I think at some point we're going to probably circle back to looking and paying attention more to the companies that are using more of these clean energy sources as the noise gets louder.

BitcoinAIGuy: In kind of the public platform.

Mike Alfred: And I think that's going to probably favor.

BitcoinAIGuy: Companies like Iron who, I mean, even I think Dan Roberts in his last time press conference he had.

Mike Alfred: He did seem to emphasize that in his speech that You know, they're using hydroelectric power up in Canada and they're using solar and wind in Texas and emphasizing the percentage of their platform, which exists on using renewable sources as opposed to other sources of energy.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, it's interesting that you say that, you know, XAI, they just today, I think like formerly a lawsuit was Was filed by like another one of those.

BitcoinAIGuy: NAAC.

Mike Alfred: Yeah, it was NAAC.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah. Illegal use of like gas turbines or something like that. Yeah, there. And look, it's been an issue for quite a while, right? But it's it's today it was filed by like one of the human rights, civil civil rights, human rights organizations that they're 27 gas turbines or whatever it was is being was being operated illegally. You know, it's fun. I mean, I guess it's not funny. And I mean, it makes sense, right? Like, just when we're talking about renewable energy and utilizing renewables and going to orbit, right, like putting data centers in orbit to harness more of the sun's energy. And then we have the guy who is leading that entire right movement, like one of the largest forces behind it is utilizing like natural gas turbines, turbines and like, like gas, like fossil fuel energy to an extent that no one really is doing on the planet right now. It's just funny the parallels behind it. But yeah, I think that, you know, those developments, it could definitely, you know, spark some more. Listen, there's going to be regulatory and just push back in in anything. That happens, especially in AI. So I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes more widespread. But these behind the meter generations, these behind the meter solutions are exploding. And I guess we'll just have to see what happens. But I don't think that it's worth losing sleep on, especially just being that most of the infrastructure and-- or should I say, a lot of the infrastructure right, is in friendly, specifically in this space, is in friendly states and like local governances. So, but also the, spread out model is increasing too. I think that like the two main, I guess, models, if you want to call it, is between like XAI and OpenAI, right? It's like completely different. One is extremely homogenous, one specific location. Well, up until a few months ago, right? It was the Colossus is in Memphis and then macro harder, however you want to pronounce it now is in Mississippi. But it was generally just one specific location, one specific architecture, right? One, one specific Ethernet networking, all, all Nvidia and just scaling is as fast as possible. And then on the other hand, you had open AI scattered across like vast like that's a vast range across the country, a few different types of architectures and accelerators, right, within Nvidia and AMD. So I think that, you know, like, like everyone's saying, we're early and we're going to kind of start to see over the next few years, like which model, which which build out works the best by just who the winners are. So You know, and you know, don't don't take this incorrectly, but you know, sometimes some of these.

Mike Alfred: Dialogues and platforms feel a little bit like a ****** **** but I don't think he's here. But Franz, my huge hats off to him because one of the one of the price analysts came out with like a kind of reaffirming a price target for iron today and referring to Franz's information about the fourth transformer arriving at the Sweetwater site.

Small Cap Snipa: And actually on their price analyst gave a reference to the.

Mike Alfred: X kind of platform of Franz, saying that he was also followed by the CEOs of the company. as a way of validating the information being used for the price analyst, which is a real.

Small Cap Snipa: Hats off to the fact that there's a lot of really great alpha that originates. I mean, there's unfortunately a lot of really bad negative alpha, because like also in the.

Mike Alfred: Last week, you had some other Yahoo who was posting incorrect satellite photos of the Terra Wolf site. And the TerraWolf CEO had to come out and correct him and say, Hey, you took a picture of the.

BitcoinAIGuy: Wrong data center.

Mike Alfred: That's like site one and two. It's not three and four. I don't know why sometimes there's so much negative information from people who are invested in alternative companies.

Small Cap Snipa: It's like if one company is doing well, in general, I would think it would mean it's good for.

Mike Alfred: The space and the other companies. So even like with this Nibius Iron thing, I don't know why all the Nibius guys feel so compelled all the time to say something negative about Iron.

Small Cap Snipa: I mean, if Nibius is doing well, that means Iron's going to do well.

BitcoinAIGuy: You know, I mean, I don't know.

Mike Alfred: I don't know if someone has a comment on that.

BitcoinAIGuy: Well, there's a theory that it's not my belief, but it's very popular. that serenity is being paid by someone that talks **** about Iran in particular. The ** *** they, them can't go a day without, you know, spreading flood against the iron bulls. And particularly has an interest in, you know, attacking our community and mining mafia in particular. So, yeah, I mean, I think I think they they're just trying to see, you know, seek something, some cheap engagement. I mean, we're one of the largest investor communities on this on this app. It's not just iron. It's all of us. Right. You know, I think we're similar in size and number, just like a Tesla community. Right. So yeah. or up there, right? Or like, you know, Tesla, Palantir, Hood, etc.. I think we're, you know, I think we're up there in numbers and size and intelligence, right? And that threatens, you know, some people that are recently popular and have something to prove. So, Yeah, I mean, it's good marketing too. I mean, I think it's the negative attention from some of those accounts. It just keeps, you know, the winners relevant, right? I mean, they don't, the winners don't need the attention. They're going to earn it, right? But It says something, right? They're not, you know, Serenity's not talking about marathon. Serenity's not talking about riot. They're not talking about, you know, hive. They're not talking about bit deer, right? They're talking about iron for a reason because they're threatened. And, you know, I think that the price action over the next few weeks is going to surprise them and make them look like idiots, right? Like, I think it's I think it's his or her 15 minutes of fame is coming to an end. And Serenity is going to end up looking like a huge clown. So that's my thoughts on the FUD.

Small Cap Snipa: Well, what's crazy is how much this app changes, or maybe not just this app, but specifically like on FinTwit in the financial sector. how much the app and the content changes on a week to week time frame regarding how the market is performing. You know, like there's people that, if you want to call them the doomers, I mean, that we're telling people to sell and look, I'm going to be here no matter what happens. I can try to provide value as much as I can, whether it's news or thoughts, analysis, but Man, I'd love to hear from some of these people who were really calling for just the destruction and the end of times and the market losing multiple digits, right? And I think, again, like I said earlier, fear sells and there's a lot of people trying to build their personal brands and whether they're selling something or not, the easiest way to do that is just call for the worst possible thing to happen and be contrarian. But man, I would love to just hold some people accountable.

BitcoinAIGuy: Well, there's a lot of pressure on them, right? Like, because they're always looking for the next hot trade, right? They're looking for the next, you know, 50%, 100% gain every week, every other day, right? Like, that's exhausting. There's no way you can keep up with that much fundamental research, understand how the stock trades, you know, you know, get a feel for the management team, understand how the other investors, both institutional and retail, think. There's a lot that goes on, like when when when serious people, you know, invest. Right. I can like, I'm, you know, overweight iron and I can hardly keep up with one name and I spent all my time thinking about this thing, right? Like it's, it's, yes, I look at everything in this market, but it's challenging. Like I couldn't recommend a new stock in a new sector every, you know, every other day. Yeah, sure, you could say it's an AI bottleneck or that's a thematic, but Uh, you know, it is, uh, it's just too much, right? Like it's, uh, and I, and I find it like, I don't know, I find you suspicious, right? Especially if they're just looking for, uh, penny stocks or, uh, very small market cap, uh, pump and dumps, right? Like it's, uh, that, that's not the game I'm trying to play, right? The game I'm trying to play is like find winners, uh, you know, where I can, uh, trust the management team and, you know, benefit from the asymmetric upside. And if I can weather the volatility, I think there's an opportunity to make a 10x, right? So like that, that those are the situations I am attracted to, not looking for the next like pump. There is like a huge Demand for that, right? I mean, like, that's what the whole meme coin community was about, right? They were just looking for the next pump. They didn't care about Bitcoin. They weren't even talking about Ethereum. Right. You know, Solana was too boring for them. So they're they're just focused on these pump and dumps. And it's the same type of audience that are following the serenities that are just looking for the next hot trade. They couldn't give a **** about building out AI infrastructure, data centers, you know, they don't care about profit margins, balance sheets, you know, and there's a ton of those individuals, right? But that's not the company I want to keep. Like I, you know, I want to be a part of a community that is trying to, you know, be a trillion dollar community, right? Like, I want people that have skin in the game, they're here for the long term, and that can stick around, right? Like, I'm not just here for a quick trade. And that's like the difference between myself and a person like Serenity. Right? Like it is just, you know, I could do what they're doing, right? Like, and get 100,000, 200,000 followers that way. But I'm not interested in that, right? There's a reason I'm concentrated on the sector. It's because I know I'm going to win, right? And I don't have the energy to look for, you know, a new company every other day. it's just not it's not it's not worth my time and I have a sizable Roth IRA I mean I could I trade in and out all I want right uh you know I could do that but it you know it's the same reason I used to be a crypto Trader too right uh it's it's the same reason I'm not doing that anymore because it's uh it's it's like a dog-eat-dog world it's a zero-sum game uh and it's full of rug pulls so I I'd rather play games that I can win repeatedly in industries that are high margin, high growth, and sustainable. And that's just not attractive, right? People don't want to hear a three-year bull case, right? They want to hear, how am I going to dole my money tomorrow? Right. Like that. That is that is cool. Right. I've had some hot trades. Right. But that that's not, you know, the real company that I want to surround myself with.

Ernest Hamilton: Yeah. That that explains someone who was a fundamental investor versus a press release, you know, pump swing trader type of situation.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, totally. Mike, we have the possibility of, I mean, there's so much going on that we don't really spend too much time thinking about like the SpaceX, XAI and Anthropic, OpenAI, IPOs, but I was, you know, just thinking about it. I don't know if, I mean, I'm not old enough to really know when the last time we've had, or if there ever has been like three companies at this magnitude, the just like other larger than life you know, companies with influence across these different sectors, pushing the frontiers and potentially just having multi-trillion dollar IPO valuations. I'm wondering what, just as a fund manager.

Mike Alfred: I've talked about this a lot over the last couple of months. No, there's never in the history of capital markets have there been companies of this size that are still private and then happen to be going public together. And I've been saying for a month as well, that there will not be any sort of long-term top in the equity markets while these companies are still waiting to go out. This is not the way. People just don't understand how markets work. It's almost systematic. I get that most people have never been around a market that's starting to heat up for IPOs, because we really haven't had a good market for IPOs in a while. And we certainly have never had companies of this size in this quality. But all of the biggest investors in public technology equities have some exposure now to these companies. And a lot of the biggest publicly traded companies, period, also own equity exposure, the Amazons and the Googles, et cetera. So everything's pretty intertwined. And again, it's all intertwined at the AI and CapEx level, and it's why the S&P marched higher over the last three years, even though most components in the S&P did nothing. So yeah, we're much more likely to go up as long as those companies' IPOs are still ahead of us. The only real risk is that once one or more of them go out, depending on the reception and how much of A mania there is about them, that's when you need to start looking for signs of eventually a potential topping because of too much exuberance. I don't think we're anywhere near that yet, but I remember in the late 90s, it went from like exuberant to extremely exuberant in like six months, right, three to six months, which is a conceivable situation here where nobody could have imagined it. I mean, just two weeks ago, people in these spaces said we were going to go much lower and everything was going to get worse. Now, the NASDAQ's behaving like it's going to double again or something. It's just wild how quickly sentiment changes. And even when you tell people that can happen, they don't believe it. But I think what could happen here is we go from really cold and really dark and feeling like we're heading into another April of last year, and then we flip. And then people might be shocked how quickly we go from, OK, somewhat positive, because the market's going up-- most people don't believe it yet, by the way. Look at your timeline. The vast majority of people still, they think it's crazy the market's going up. It reminds me of COVID, February, March of 2020. The general commentary on here, which was easily fadeable, and I did, fade it was like, well, markets can't go up because people aren't, like the economy's closed, and I can't go to my job, and the restaurants aren't open, and the NBA teams aren't playing, so the market can't go up. And that was just, with the benefit, we didn't even need hindsight, right? I didn't even need to see what happened, to know how naive that view was. And I was arguing against those people lifetime in mid-March. And of course, that was the best buying opportunity of the last six years. There's been a couple of others, right, like December of 2022, March of 2023, April of 2025, and then perhaps the last month or so. But but what I think is going to happen is we go from extreme fear and a lot of negativity and a lot of people thinking we're in this deep bear market to, oh my god, holy **** I'm sidelined now. I don't have enough exposure. And SpaceX is going to go out in a couple months. And then Anthropic, which is the best company in the world, still needs to go out. And that's not going to happen until October. And they're just going to run the market up. The investors that trade public equities have exposure to Anthropic. And so as Anthropic gets closer to IPO, they're getting closer to be able to partially crystallize the gains in an investment that's performed really well for them. That money is going to circulate back into the market. It creates animal spirits, but it also creates a healthy rotation of capital as well. So yeah, we've got a good three, six, nine month period in here. My only concern is that actually things get too good. What you want, and I've said this a lot over the last couple years, what you want is an environment where a lot of the dumbest people in investing, like basically the people who have been like nonstop bearish for the last three years, you want them to stay bearish because if they actually get, they wise up to how the game works and realize there's no real big money made in markets unless you just buy and hold like a large size, high quality stuff that goes up and you hold it across cycles and you hold it and let it compound, like you don't want them to figure that out. You want them to think that they're making money and adding alpha by shorting and selling because they think they're going to experience a small drawdown. Basically, a bunch of people who are going to miss 1,000 and 3,000% returns because they're trying to avoid a 10% drawdown. It sounds really dumb when you say it, but that's what most of the **** on here is all about. People, they're trying to build a Telegram group, and they're selling a subscription, so in order to convince people to do that, they have to help them avoid a 10% drawdown. Well, they're going to, I've noticed people like Ben Cowan, he's literally helped his subscribers Avoid 100 of the last four drawdowns of 10% or more. So you've sold 100 times, and you only got four drawdowns. But for sure, on the one time you go down more than 10%, he's going to remind you that he was right. And so people just make the intellectual error of thinking that that's intelligent behavior. So what will happen if I'm right is-- first off, I've been right already, because almost everybody was telling me I was an idiot two weeks ago for saying we'd CFV recovery. And the NASDAQ and the S&P have already recovered. I think Bitcoin is in the process of doing the same thing. A number of the small cap equities we cover are in the process of doing the same thing. So that's in motion. But we still have largely fearful negative sentiment in the broader market. And so you want that to persist as long as possible, because the longer that persists, the higher the next move will take us. You basically want people to be sidelined. You want them to be following chart squigglers like Ben Cowen as long as possible, because that'll force them to effectively pile in and FOMO in at higher prices. And that, in addition to short covering, is what creates a lot of the parabolic price movement. Contrary to what you may believe, a lot of these big moves in stocks as they move up are not serious long-term fundamental investors or institutions, those people already took positions. I said this a number of times in space over the last month. If you look at the way Cypher was trading, you'll look back in three to six months, it'll be so freaking obvious that the institutions were gobbling up shares between $12 and $15 when people on here were freaking out because it was ostensibly in a downtrend. Those people already bought. What causes the move up later is the short sellers who will hold on as long as possible, once they realize they're going to get blown out, they cover quite quickly, and they tend to do it all at the same time. And then at the same time, you'll have people who subscribe to a lot of these people on X who are currently either flat or out of the market or short. Those people will get basically clobbered on the way up, and then they'll be forced to switch sides. But of course, they'll probably be switching sides too late to benefit from most of the move, and in a lot of cases, they'll switch sides right before the next intermediate term top. So it pays to just do the opposite of those people. It pays to figure out what those people are doing and then do the exact opposite. And so you definitely don't want to be too bearish in front of Anthropic and OpenAI, but you probably don't want to be too bullish right as it's happening, if that makes sense. And look, I really hope these IPOs go well and the CapEx cycle continues for two, three years, and maybe we've got a nice long run. But if we get a lot of exuberance in Q3, Q4, I'll be one of the first people who says, hey, I'm not calling for a major drawdown yet, but I'm going to be honest when I'm more cautious. And there's zero signs-- I've been saying this for three years now, but there's zero signs of any good reason to be cautious from an investment standpoint. When you start to see those signs, I'll be one of the first people talking about it. And that will happen when it happens, but there's no sign of it yet, in my opinion.

Small Cap Snipa: So being cautious, it looks different for everyone, but it definitely looks different when you're running a fund. So I mean, I'm just wondering, and again, it's all hypothetical, when you say if something like that were to happen, what's your-- What's your idea or kind of how do you start allocating capital when you're running a fund? I know that you might not be able to share too much, but does it look like kind of just rotating some capital until like, if you want to call it like the traditional economy, the real economy, like Staples and--?

Mike Alfred: Yeah, I mean, that's what I did coming to this year. So I was able to cushion, I had much larger positions in Staples, I had a big position in a railroad. I had a bunch of more defensive names, and then those names went up quite quickly in the first month or two this year, and then I trimmed them way back. Actually, when you see my 13F, which comes out in mid-May, you'll see just how dramatically, like I cut Pepsi and Constellation Brands and Diageo, thankfully, because that one didn't work quite as well, but Canada Pacific, Kansas City, Target, bristol-myers, Squibb, et cetera, like those names are all ripping this year and they kept moving up after the kind of small caps in Bitcoin and everything started to make a more aggressive down move after like the third week of January in anticipation of probably this geopolitical conflict and maybe another government shutdown and some liquidity constraints and concerns about the Fed chair being actually able to get through. So there's all this stuff. So that's one way, right? Just simple rotation from whatever has got the most exuberance in it into things that have the least amount of exuberance. That's one method. You can also just hedge via indices. So for a part of 2023, I was hedged with an SPY short, which is a positive carry trade right now because you're getting paid more. on your cash at these interest rates, then you're paying to borrow, right? So at the time, I think I was borrowing like 20 something million of SPY for like 20 basis points or 25 basis points. And I was getting paid over 4% on cash. So it was like a 3.8% embedded return, irrespective of what direction the trade actually went. And I kind of used it as like a protection against the large, because my view in early 2023 was effectively that You would either everything was going to go up, in which case Bitcoin would dramatically outperform the S&P over the coming two, three years, or you're going to see a major, another major kind of echo macro drawdown, in which case the S&P, the SPY short would provide partial coverage against that. And I ended up being right. Like I said, even that year, I think I said the trade of the year is long Bitcoin short SPY. SPY was up 25 or so percent and Bitcoin was up like 150%, 125%, something like that, right? And then the next year was almost the same. So SPY outperform, Bitcoin outperformed SPY two years in a row by like four to five times. So it ended up being largely correct. I thought as a relative value trade that made sense as a long short. So that's an easy one. Hedging with indices is great because, again, it's positive carry on the cash. And then you also are not taking idiosyncratic company risks. If you short individual companies in large size, those individual companies can go on massive runs that indices don't tend to do. And again, if indices do it, then almost everything is moving, which means your longs are moving with it. I was explaining this to Small Cap Sniper, actually, related to my silver trade back in January, where I was short 20 million of the SLV. which at the time to me was a relatively low risk trade because of the way the rest of my book was set up. Worked out really well, confused a lot of people and made a lot of people angry, but it's honestly just basic portfolio management. And again, I've been around a long time. So when I see exuberance, I know exactly what real exuberance looks like and what it isn't. And silver in January was classic. It was exhibiting all of the signs. which, by the way, Bitcoin never exhibited even at 125, 126. Silver exhibited signs of exhibitors that far exceeded what Bitcoin was sort of sending at 125, 126, which made it a very easy short, particularly given that one part of the long thesis for silver at the time was that it was going to be used in AI data centers. So if you were long AI data center stocks being short, silver was actually a reasonable hedge and partially for that reason. So that's another way you can sell calls, right? So I never sell calls early cycle. I'm not interested in selling calls on stocks that I think can go up 20 or 30x. So like I never sold calls on Cypher, not once. I would have thought that was dumb. I had 7 million shares. I could have made a lot of money selling calls, but there's a good chance that I'd have far fewer shares today as those. periodically, Cypher likes to go up 70% in a month. So it does nothing for a couple months and then it goes up 70% a month. So if you're writing calls and your position is too big, you're going to get those shares, call it away, you're just going to lose a lot of money doing that. It's like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. So I wouldn't do that then, but let's just say Cypher goes to 100 or something this year. I would sell, I would certainly sell calls on Cypher if it goes to 100. If it goes to 100, I'm happy to sell you $120 calls, right? I'm just not willing to sell like a lot of people. we're doing for much of the last three years. I'm not willing to sell $7 calls when it's five or $5 calls when it's three because I was very certain eventually it was going to 25 or 50, which has now been proven correct. So you can sell calls in addition to shorting indices, you can buy puts. And you may do some combination of all of those, right? So trimming positions and rotating, selling calls, buying puts, shorting indices, those are all things you could do. But again, I'm largely, I resist doing that, except at times where I see extreme behavior, like I saw, for example, in January with silver. Again, silver might have been the biggest mania that I've seen over the last three or four years. Like it's the thing that was exhibiting the classic signs that I've seen every time a market gets overheated and probably needs a significant cool off. So we may see that. Hopefully we see it, because it means we're probably up substantially from where we are now. But what you'll also tend to see at the same time is a lot of people who weren't here now will suddenly show up saying they're bullish on the stocks that you've been talking about for three years. And that's another warning side that maybe were a little bit later cycle. But it's still mostly the people that I've noticed that are talking about the stuff, they've been in the game for a while. They're not dumb. They're not the people that show up late chasing usually. So I'll be watching for that, but I haven't seen it yet. I got to run, guys. Thanks so much for having me.

Small Cap Snipa: Appreciate you, Mike. Thanks for coming on and sharing some. That was great stuff. You're not going to get value like this anywhere else. So man, these X spaces are awesome. Bitcoin AI guy, last thing before we get out of here tonight. It's 1.30 on basically 1.30 on the East Coast. I got to be up in about four hours from now. So do you think that we're going to start seeing just every failing company whether they have infrastructure or not, whether they're a shoe company or a beverage company or a waste management company, whatever it is, you think that we're going to start seeing these failing companies, that their stock price is down 80, 90% from high, just try to raise some money and purchase some GPUs and transition to AI. Like that's, I don't know if today was concerning or not. I don't want to call it and say that the Allbirds transition was like bubble like activity, it could definitely just be some, it looked like a classic short squeeze. But I wouldn't be surprised if like as soon as tomorrow we start seeing some of this, some of this stuff. Ernest, you got your hand up. Go for it.

Ernest Hamilton: Yeah, man, I just want to say I thought AllBirds was a real shoo in for the old HPC AI pivot personally.

Small Cap Snipa: No pun intended, right?

Frans Bakker: This is a small cap. I will say what was awesome about the shoe company deciding it once again the compute is to me that's more bullish than bearish because it shows there's still not a level of exhaustion for investing activity, right? Like you're having a shoe company go 6x and we have gigawatts secured and we're moving 2, 3% on the daily. Hopefully we get a nice move tomorrow or throughout the week. But to me, I have heard that narrative as well as like it could be bubble-esque, right? Because everybody's ******* investing in anything that throws, they throw AI in front of it. However, I would look at the contrary as like, okay, wow, they have money to throw at a shoe company saying AI. Okay, we got the gigawatts. So like, they're just strapping the seatbelt?

Ernest Hamilton: Yeah, I mean, companies are literally selling their souls for HPC AI right now.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, I just, I mean, I just don't get it, man. I mean, I guess I do get it, but it's kind of just wild. It's like a $50 million race to purchase GPUs. What is that getting you? I mean, I guess that the stock price, it doesn't really-- the market cap kind of reflects that, right? Like today, I think it closed like around $125, $150 billion. So it's not like this company just randomly jumped to being a 10-figure company, right? out, in one day after one announcement. So, but nonetheless, it is, it is pretty insane. And I literally think that within the next day or two, we're going to see another transition just like this from another, whether it's a similar company or not, something within the realm of what Albert's did today. AI guy.

BitcoinAIGuy: Yeah, I mean, I'm not in that business, right? Like, I'm not looking for these penny stocks that are going to do the AI. switch. Like that might be what Serenity does. You know, you might want to follow they/them on that. You know, they'll find the next like beyond me that's going to, you know, get into AI or something, right? Like that's not what I'm trying to do. Like what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to, you know, own the future, right? And I'm going to pick the winners. that are positioned for that today. And it's not clear, right, to the majority of the market. And I think that's the alpha that we have, right, in this community. And it's just not, it's not, we're not that popular compared to like, you know, the serenities right now because we're not seeing these stocks move 600% a day, right? Or the stocks we're talking about move that much in a day or a week, right? But that's not the point, right? You know, I'll tell you a story that this happened like last year. I was traveling and I was in a hotel lobby. I think I made a tweet about it, but it's related to like, there's two ways I could have like interpreted this experience. Like, oh my God, is this a bubble? Or, oh my God, we're still early. But I'll tell you a story. So I was in a hotel lobby and I was like walking into like this, like, just like the open area and I was grabbing some coffee or something and I overheard like some guys, you know, in business clothes, business casual, right? And they're on the phone and I overheard them. They're raising money for an AI data center and they wanted to incorporate Bitcoin mining. And this is, you know, at the same time, like I think Iron was like $34 on this is last year, not this recent $34 to on the way to $76, right? And I'm like, are we in a ******* bubble right now? Because I've never like really interacted with just like people talking about what we talk about on a daily basis here on Twitter. And these aren't public company executives. These are just like, companies that were just starting to raise money to build out like a 50 to 100 megawatt facility. And they're going to bootstrap that project with AI. And I don't think these guys, these guys are like, you know, a lot older, like in their, you know, 60s. And I don't know if they're the type of people to be on Twitter, but I'm just like, I was, and then they kind of looked at me, but no one knows what I look like in real life. And I was like dressed like a homeless dude at the time. So I don't think they thought I was spying on them. But I was definitely like eavesdropping. And, you know, they're talking about like the same type of metrics that we measure, like dollars per megawatt and I captured this all in like two, three minutes and I'm like savoring this. And I'm like, there's no way this is happening. I'm in a random ******* hotel hearing this ****. And yeah, like they were just like making calls back-to-back trying to raise money from investors. And I'm like, dude, like the companies we follow already secured gigawatts. They have access to capital in the billions, right? They have access to the credit markets. And, you know, they're well positioned today. And just, I think everyone's going to be trying to get into this over the next few years, right? Especially like the public companies. And I think this could be like the next, like, you know, Bitcoin treasury type of moves where You had an underperforming business and all of a sudden these companies are now orange pilled and want to be the next Michael Saylor, right? I think it's easier to become a Bitcoin treasury company than to build AI data centers and deliver the compute on time. We saw this in Bitcoin mining in 2020, right? When everyone wanted to be a Bitcoin miner and pump their stock. 70X, 100X. And the funny thing is like Bitcoin mining is so much easier, right, to deploy compared to AI infrastructure, right, AI data centers. And they were still like struggling to ramp up to one or two X a hash, right, over a short period of time. Part of it was like due to supply chain, but they got the pump they wanted, right? And it was very difficult for them to deliver compute on time because everyone wanted those miners and it was so challenging to get them from China. And we're seeing the same type of phenomenon today with GPUs, right? And Jensen, on his recent interview, he was talking about how you know, how we, how we fulfill his orders. And obviously he, you know, the best customers are the ones that can pay for the GPUs, you know, via a purchase order and ones that can actually deliver, receive delivery of the GPUs and deliver that compute, right? And I don't think we're in a world where it's hard to raise capital for AI, but the question is like, you know, are these GPUs just going to be sitting in a warehouse? Like, just like some of the Bitcoin miners were sitting on, you know, thousands and thousands of Bitcoin mining ASICs, right, and failed to plug them in, right? Is that phenomenon going to continue, right, in the AI world or, And who are the companies that are going to actually be able to deliver this compute on time? It's the ones that have access to capital, that have an allocation, and that can deliver that compute because they're already secured that capacity. They already built the data centers. And that's the time to compute narrative. Right. And there's very few of those companies and we all know them in this space. Right. So that is the alpha. And that's what I'm excited for. Like everyone wants to be a neo cloud because that's where the cap, it's easy to raise capital and aspire to be the next core we've, you know, Nebius. or iron, right? Like it's hot, right? The data center market's growing 80% a year, CAGR. And if you're a hot in YieldCloud, you could, you know, grow even faster than that, right? If you're a winner, right? But that's a hard story to, you know, show an investor if they don't, you know, if they don't know the truth, right? Very few people actually understand these fundamentals. So, yeah, I mean, that trend's probably going to continue like just like random companies in 2019, 2020, we're all trying to be a blockchain company. Everyone's going to try to be an AI company. Right. But that's you know, I'm not trying to chase those pumps, right? I think the real alpha is picking the winners that are well positioned and have the experience from a, you know, management perspective, the assets they control and own. right, that are vertically integrated. And then you come to an answer and it's like, okay, no wonder, you know, why this stock is doing so well. It's because of the proof of work. It's because of the visionary founders. And it's just a good idea and it's still early. So those are my thoughts. Went on for a little bit longer than I wanted, but That's what I think.

Small Cap Snipa: Yeah, that was money. That was money, bro. We're going to wrap it up at that. I couldn't think of a better way to cap it. Guys, I just want to thank you all for joining, showing up, being a part of this. Massive, massive shout out to every single one of the speakers. You guys dropped just immense value tonight. Killed it. was great. This space is recorded, so Feel free to check out my profile after if you miss anything. If you didn't hear some of the other speakers talk, we had Mike for a good hour and a half at least in here. We've been running this thing almost five hours now. So again, great audience. Really appreciate you guys. If you haven't already, you enjoyed the space, you want to see another one, toss me a follow. Toss all of the speakers up on here a follow too. any type of market updates, insights, future events, whatever the case may be, I got you guys on that and the speakers do as well. And if you guys aren't in there yet, check out Mining Mafia. Join it, great community, a lot of like-minded people, people that just want to, people who want to win, investors want to win in AI, just very supportive. So definitely check that out. Again, I appreciate you guys We'll be running these spaces weekly. So keep a lookout for them. Stay strong. Keep grinding. We'll see you on the next one. Peace. Have a good night.