NUAI 101 with Will Gray (CEO) and Charlie Nelson (Executive Director)
Hosted by @Kash · 2025-12-03 · Tags: NUAI
TLDR
NUAI executives described their transition from natural gas and helium into large-scale AI data center development, centered on behind-the-meter gas generation in West Texas. Their first 438-acre TCDC site targets roughly 450 MW in phase one and more than 1 GW later, with an exclusive prospective tenant, an anticipated 18-month construction cycle, and asset-level financing intended to limit shareholder dilution. Management was highly optimistic but acknowledged that definitive tenant agreements, financing, final investment approval, and execution remain outstanding.
- NUAI's core thesis is BYOP, or bring your own power, to bypass congested utility interconnection queues.
- The TCDC site is a 50-50 joint venture with Sharon AI and covers all development within the 438-acre property, while the announced second asset is wholly owned by NUAI.
- TCDC sits between two existing power plants and has access to three natural gas transmission pipelines, providing fuel capacity and redundancy.
- Phase one is designed for about 450 MW of IT load, with phase two intended to increase total capacity beyond 1 GW.
- Smaller parallel gas-generation units, approximately 20% spare capacity, and ride-through batteries are intended to deliver data-center-grade reliability.
- Management expects an approximately 18-month build cycle and currently targets commercial operations in the second half of 2027.
- The company is under exclusivity with a prospective tenant and is actively negotiating lease terms alongside iterative engineering work.
- The business model centers on long-term triple-net data center leases, while a partner is expected to own and finance the power-generation assets.
- NUAI plans to finance construction primarily through asset-level debt and project equity secured against tenant lease revenue, minimizing top-company equity issuance.
- Modular prefabricated data center designs are expected to reduce on-site construction labor by roughly 80% and support repeatable development at future sites.
Speakers
- Kash — Hosted the discussion, framed NUAI as potentially undervalued relative to peers, and pressed management on the TCDC joint venture, tenant timing, financing structure, dilution, and execution responsibilities.
- Will Gray — Explained his Permian Basin energy background, NUAI's transition from helium and natural gas, the value of converting stranded gas into electricity, TCDC's pipeline access, and the intended asset-level financing structure.
- Charlie Nelson — Detailed his infrastructure-development experience and explained NUAI's BYOP thesis, site engineering, generation redundancy, permitting, construction schedule, lease model, project financing, tenant negotiations, and modular construction strategy.
- Speaker 3 — Asked technical questions about energization timing, generation redundancy, batteries, turbine lead times, and gas-supply disaster recovery, then expressed approval of the proposed design.
- ₿itcoin ₿utcher — Questioned whether NUAI's lack of direct mineral ownership could create natural gas supply risk for behind-the-meter generation.
- Marcos — Asked how NUAI's BYOP approach compares with research on flexible data centers and whether it could shorten time to market or affect the company's revenue model.
Notable quotes
- “But I mean, we call it BYOP, bring your own power.” — Charlie Nelson
- “We're sitting on vast reserves of gigawatts that you don't need the grid for.” — Will Gray
- “This is a top tier asset when you're trying to build something like this.” — Charlie Nelson
- “The plan here is to then bump that up on phase two to over a gig.” — Charlie Nelson
- “Right now, as our current engineering schedules are laid out, we're looking at basically an 18-month build cycle.” — Charlie Nelson
- “raising top co equity to pay for massive infrastructure is just massively dilutive.” — Charlie Nelson
- “Yeah, where we're at right now, I mean, we're under exclusive right now.” — Charlie Nelson
- “But really what this will do is it'll cut down site construction labor by about 80%.” — Charlie Nelson
- “So I think, you know, we're thinking six moves ahead, not just kind of like, hey, let's go sign an end tenant and make a PR announcement.” — Will Gray
Transcript
Kash: Hi, good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you're listening from. Hope everyone's doing all right. Just doing a quick sound check here with five minutes left on the clock. A few people are still joining in. Will, Charlie, I thought I'd get you guys to just check your microphones once just to make sure we've got no audio issues.
Will Gray: Yeah, Cash. Hey, it's Will. How are you?
Kash: Good, Will. Hey, Charlie here. How are we doing today? Good. Audio's coming in nice and clear. Charlie, you might want to step back just a tad from the microphone if you can, but otherwise I can hear you great. All right. We'll give folks a couple of minutes here to just join. It's been a very highly anticipated session. A lot of folks in the background have been asking to hear from you guys. So really glad to have you both on.
Will Gray: Well, this is going to be this is going to be really informative. So just again, Cash, this is a great idea. So thanks for orchestrating this. This is amazing.
Kash: Absolutely. We're waiting on our friend Dulce, and I've asked others to join as co-hosts. If you've got an invite from me, please accept just to let me know that one, it's working. And 2, if you could inform me on how many co-hosts one could have, this is clearly my first time doing that part of it.
Will Gray: Interesting.
Kash: Will, Charlie, both you guys are in... Will, you might be in California, correct?
Will Gray: No, I'm in Midland right now.
Kash: Oh, Midland. Okay, cool.
Will Gray: And Charlie's based in Boulder.
Kash: Awesome. Okay. Very good. Just a couple of more minutes, guys.
Will Gray: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So there is a lot of innovation from Midland. ASTS also is from Midland, right?
Will Gray: Wait, who's from Midland?
Speaker 3: ASTS as well. AST Space Mobile.
Kash: The satellite guys.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Will Gray: They're at the, they call the airport this, what is it? Spaceport. Spaceport. Yeah. Many things happen, many things happen in Midland. Pretty interesting.
Speaker 3: Pretty interesting, yeah. Great place to be, Neil.
Will Gray: It's not just the Landman TV series, okay? So don't think that.
Kash: Which I've yet to watch. I heard, I was down in Houston last week talking to a bunch of guys in the power and the trading space and the gas side of things. And they were raving about, was it, is it Billy Bob Thornton?
Will Gray: Yeah, it's pretty funny because he's it's really it's really funny, because I refuse to watch it. And all my buddies, across the world of like, my gosh, this it's such a such happened in West Texas. I'm like, no, it doesn't. So yeah, so I had to watch it and I was just like, why am I watching this? But I thoroughly enjoy it. I'm not going to lie to you.
Kash: All righty. Well, it's highly recommended. It's on my watch list here, so can wait. And with that, speaking of things that we can't wait for, we're on the clock here right at 2 p.m. Eastern and thought we might as well kick it off. So first of all, Will, Charlie, pleasure to have you on Spaces. Thank you very much for making the time to join us today.
Will Gray: Yeah, Kash, thanks for having us. This has been a long time coming, so really appreciate it. Thanks for orchestrating this.
Kash: Yeah, absolutely. One of the big reasons for us to host this space today is because a lot of folks have been only recently unearthing NUAI as an opportunity to invest. And everybody's sitting there scratching their head going, this thing has a market cap of 200 odd million. And it's sitting on, at least in the immediate future, a gigawatt site. You guys have already gone out and announced that you're going to have a prospective tenant here signed and announced in short order. And in the meantime, you've got all these other guys who are scrambling to get in a couple of 100 megawatts up and running with a deal struck and they're trading in the billions. So this is kind of why I've called this the NUAI 101 here today and really looking forward to the conversation with both of you. I'm joined by Dulce, who's a co-host, and Stock Meetups guy. So Really appreciate the time. Thought we might as well dive right into it, guys. Will, Charlie, we don't know very much about you guys. So maybe I'd hand it over to Will in the first instance to just talk a bit about his background experience and how he ended up here. And we'll do the same with you, Charlie, right after.
Will Gray: That makes perfect sense. I appreciate it, guys. Yeah. So obviously, Charlie and I, we've been on a non-deal roadshow with our bank. And so we spent a lot of time last week really kind of introducing the story. So I think Charlie and I have the pitch down pretty well right now. So this is perfect timing. So we did about 25 different dry runs last week in preparation for this call. So perfect timing. So my name is Will Gray, Everett Willard Gray II, but obviously go by Will. But born and raised here in Midland, Texas. I'm 50 years old, so kind of have seen the Permian Basin basically just evolved into what is the behemoth it is right now. I mean, it's this place never ceases to amaze me how it just somewhat reinvents itself just from the, you know, verbal, you know, commingling of, you know, oil wells to gas wells, you know, the evolution of what has gone on with horizontal drilling, fracking, and now, of course, now with the water, the midstream infrastructure, what they're doing. obviously with lithium mining. And now, of course, Bitcoin mining has been going on here for about 2016, 2017. And now, of course, just taking that to the next level, which is AI data centers. So my background, of course, if you're born in Midland, Texas cash, you are going to be in the energy business. There is no, it's just what aspect of the energy business will you be in. And I happen to fall into what they call, you know, upstream and midstream. operations. And so I focused more specifically on conventional oil and gas as opposed to drilling horizontal wells. So I kind of like my background is you kind of just the easiest place to find oil, the running joke is where it already exists. And I kind of find that pretty much true with power. The easiest place to find power is where it already exists. And that's kind of that's been the main thesis about, you know, new era energy and digital is Why are, who are we and where do we come from and what makes us so special? But before we kind of get into that, I kind of wanted to give a brief background. this is not our first rodeo in regards to building out, complex, infrastructure, things of that nature. We have a, between Charlie and myself and our board, we have a storied history of execution and delivering, you know, results. And with that being said, let's, I wanted to introduce Charlie as well because he's been quite instrumental in really getting us to where we are today.
Charlie Nelson: And yeah, Cash, it's a pleasure to meet you and thank everyone for joining on here. Looking forward to kind of sharing the story here and giving a deeper look into the company. My background, just by way of introduction, I'm a chemical engineer by training. I'm originally from Iowa. I started my career developing, building, and operating all sorts of different infrastructure. We're talking pipelines, processing plants with power Gen. compressor stations, terminals. I love the acquisition of a railroad one time and rehabbed it. So I've kind of gone through all sorts of things. And by the way, I don't necessarily recommend that. It's a beast. And you know, post that, you know, that company sold, you know, post that, I've built up what's It's called eFuels. We kind of helped create that industry with a company called Infinium, and that's CO2 into jet fuel. That's now backed by Brookfield Infrastructure, built a private equity-backed chemical and fuels company after that, built multiple plants, one actually in West Texas. And so I've built plants there, sold that. So I've kind of been around a lot of different types of infrastructure. You know, myself, how I got involved in New Era. You know, I was actually on the board originally as an independent board member. And And when we are going through the transition over the summer and kind of fully leaning into, leaning into the transition from, what was new area helium and we'll tap, we'll tap into exactly how that whole transition occurred. into New Era Energy and Digital. I lead in on a full-time basis as an executive board director and just leading in more and more full-time every day. And so this is kind of my day in, day out. But that's kind of me as a background. And then we can dive into kind of why, you know, how we're here. I mean, happy to kind of introduce what's been going on and like why, you know, New Era, NuAI has the basically the right to succeed here. So, I mean, if we want to tap into that, happy to start or happy to take this wherever you want to go.
Kash: Yeah, you know, that's a great segue. Why don't you give us a bit of an overview of NuAI, what is its MO, and how did you guys get here?
Charlie Nelson: Oh, look, I mean. Go ahead. Oh, yeah. Okay. Look, you know, the reality is, is that like the data center industry is like data centers have been around for, you know, since the nineties. They used to not be called data centers and they were a telecom deal that evolved into, you know, what we know as cloud today. But, you know, two years ago, you know, two, two and a half years ago, you know, a large data center was like 50 to 100 megawatts. I mean, that was a monster of a data center back then. And, and that was, you know, pre, you know, ChatGPT 3 going live, which really kind of happened in November of 23. And, and so, you know, and that's when, you know, that, that went live, you know, and just some of, you know, some of our friends from the hyperscalers who, you know, these are folks we hadn't done business with in the past, but just like casual acquaintances and friends, you know, started calling up and being like, we might actually have a real problem here, like, you know, these power numbers are pretty, pretty insane. And so, fast forward to today, that's when we started kind of investigating the problem as a whole. today, people throw around the term gigawatt pretty loosely, without kind of realizing what a gigawatt means. Like a gigawatt is roughly the size, the power consumption of like the city of Denver, for example. And so when you throw around, you know, a term gigawatt and you're, you know, you're trying to plop gigawatts all over the grid, you know, the grid in the utility sector just is not, you know, it's not like there's this free gigawatts sitting around. You know, you could do that once or twice, but really, like you pretty quickly start to stress the system. And, you know, utilities really are, you know, our thesis is, is that utilities aren't really like built to address the situation in a timely manner. You know, like you go and apply and like just some stats like on ERCOT alone, which is a, let's call it a 105 gigawatt total system. There's like a 200 gigawatt backlog, which is an absurd figure. And And so where does that leave the future of data center development? Well, back when it was 50 to 100 megawatts, the long hole in the tent or the hard part about it was you need to locate close to fiber, you need to locate close to water, but for the most part, you'd just buy a piece of land that had those nearby and that had a power line, 138 kV and above, and you'd go to the utility and say, I need an interconnect for 50 megawatts in 18 months. And they'd be like, All right. You'd build the substation and you'd build the data center and away you'd go. The complexities of doing that now at the scale that's going on, the difficulty has been in procuring power. And utilities are getting stressed nationwide. This isn't just an ERCOT thing, you know, PJM and look, you pick a grid and it's stressed. And so really what it's come to is that utilities, you know, with their elongated times, I mean, really, you've got the unstoppable force of the tech industry moving at an incredible pace, meaning somewhat of the immovable object of the utility space that has to operate in a regulated environment. So our thesis has been, well, you're just going to like the best thing to do is just build power and build the power and co-locate that with the data centers. And look, if the grid shows up, fantastic, when it shows up, fantastic. But I mean, we call it BYOP, bring your own power. And so that's really the thesis we've been operating under. And it's allowed us, because we've built power assets before, collectively as a team, both me, Will, the board, et cetera. And really, when it comes down to it, building power is not really that difficult. And when you want to build power, you go to where the natural resource to convert into that power makes the most sense. And you start looking at places like West Texas and it starts making an awful lot of sense. And so really that was kind of the basis of our entire thesis getting into this was, if we're going to get into this, we're going to build our own power and we're going to execute like we know how to execute on these types of projects. and build it through, and we'll kind of go through like strengthened partnerships. I know we wanted to talk through this, but look, you don't boil the ocean. You bring in partners that can help you execute. You build credibility in your execution plan. And really, that's just what we've been doing over the course of the development here that we've got going on. So I'll stop.
Will Gray: Let me just kind of add on that, if you don't mind, Cash. I think for all the listeners out here, so again, we're We're energy experts. And I think, you know, a lot of a lot of individuals on here may be generalists. They may be, I mean, I think everyone on here definitely has a take on energy. And I think what's interesting is you just turn on CNBC and you see NYMEX natural gas, right? And automatically you think, oh, NAC gas is going for, you know, $5 for MCF. I think what people don't understand is that gas trades on a regional basis. And so for the Permian basis, it trades what they call the WAHA, so it's W-A-H-A. And kind of what really got me going was back in 2016 when Waha actually was going negative. So when that means your gas, natural gas prices are negative, that means you're paying your mid-streamers money to take your gas or you're having to flare it. So really that was kind of the, kind of the impetus for, you know, look at Crusoe Mining, right? They were taking stranded gas and Bitcoin mining with it. And that's where kind of this idea came up. I mean, we had a large gas field in the Pecos slope that has the helium in it. And that was the original idea was, you know, we have looked at a multitude of different ideas of how do you take natural gas that has zero value and make it into money? And it's real simple. You convert it from methane to electrons. It's really that simple. And obviously, when we look at the Permian Basin, it's one of the largest, oil and gas fields in the entire world. And so how we look at it is that we're not sitting on vast reserves of natural gas. We're sitting on vast reserves of gigawatts that you don't need the grid for. And that's the problem with ERCOT. They, like Charlie had mentioned previously, I mean, I think it serves about 87 gigawatts. as it sits today with over 200 gigawatts of demand in the queue. Where's that going to come from? And what's really interesting is, you know, we did start off as a helium company and the chair of ERCOT was actually sat on our board of directors. So the ERCOT is the Texas grid. And once we made the pivot from New Era Helium to New Era Energy and Digital, you know, obviously there was a conflict of interest, so Phil had to step down. But being the insight that he that he alluded to of the just listing the bill and you kind of, reading between the lines. He was a great resource for our company and for our shareholders to educate Charlie and I how to basically execute on this pivot in what, you know, behind the meter power generation really is. Because I think that's going to be our core thesis for today's call is how do we differentiate, you know, in UAI versus the our peer comps. And it really I think it goes it just it's it gets pretty simplistic guys. It goes down to how can we execute efficiently and provide, you know, 3 nines to 59 powers to hyperscalers on a behind the meter power Gen. basis. So Kash, that's just so I guess, you know, Troy and I've kind of done a lot of the talking here. So if you wanted to, so we'll kind of we'll kind of be quiet here and let you kind of ask kind of how you want to direct this next.
Kash: No, no, this is great. So You guys were a helium company that's now transitioned to effectively AI HPC, and that is-.
Will Gray: We're natural gas and helium. So essentially 95% of the world's helium is associated with natural gas. So we kind of already had that natural gas, you know, historical background in us.
Kash: Got it. Yeah, absolutely. And the use case now is for data centered compute, and it's pretty remarkable. the scale at which you guys are going to execute. I wanted to start by giving you guys a chance to lay out the core asset that was, I think about it as a seed asset. But really, it's a mega scale site that is the kernel for the entire business plan, certainly here in the near term, and then you've got longer-term aspirations. Do you want to start first with introducing TCDC, the Texas Critical Data Center, And talk about what it is and where you are in that journey.
Will Gray: Yeah, so real quick, Charlie, let me just kind of introduce how this came about. So during the process of us going public, we went the route of whether IPOing, direct listing, or going with a SPAC. We went with a SPAC, which don't even get me started on that, it is what it is. But the one good thing that our co-sponsors did was they made the introduction to Sharon AI. And Sharon AI is a hyperscaler, a neocloud provider in Australia. And the CEO has, I mean, the chairman has phenomenal background in Bitcoin mining, which obviously we all know kind of the evolution of what Bitcoin miners are now, what they've now become, right? Data center, you know, data center campus providers. So with that being said, we, with that background, what we were looking to do was essentially, be somewhat vertically integrated using natural gas as electrons and facilitating, the development of this, what we call our asset number one, that's based in West Texas, specifically Ector County, which is Odessa, Texas. And ideally, our job was to bring the power, the nat gas, And then Sharon AI was going to bring, they have, some pretty strong relationships within the AI ecosystem. And so for, proper introductions, things of that nature. And it's really kind of funny because how it got started was, maybe what, a year and a half ago, we're looking at 90 megawatts. And then in talking with potential, you know, in tenants, that grew from 90 to 250 megawatts. And then I think everyone's seen our press releases and our operation updates. That's now gone to 450 and now the ability to scale to north of a gig. And what's interesting is this is all on site number one. And again, this is based on the Permian Basin and primarily again, behind the meter power Gen. And it's really kind of interesting, Cash, you know, like you see, you know, it's like, well, if you're, If this asset was so good, then why hasn't someone picked it up already? And it's just about timing. I think we were early to the game with our thesis of behind-the-meter power. Because a year ago, you talked to one of the household hyperscaler names and they would kind of laugh at you and be like, oh no, we want a clear path to the grid within 12 to 18 months. And all of a sudden, now a year has passed and They're calling us like, okay, how quickly can you get your behind-the-meter power joint up and running? Oh, and by the way, we don't care if it's nat gas. They don't really care what it is, as long as it's electricity. And so I think that was really kind of the impetus of how do we get to asset number one, right? And so that was really essentially A 50-50 joint venture, again, with Shared AI. And that's kind of where we're at today. Now, obviously, that's kind of asset one, and we've already made an announcement for asset two, but for right now, let's focus on asset one. And Charlie, why don't you kind of, if you don't mind, just chime in here and kind of give your thoughts on the Ector County Odessa, Texas property and kind of where we're sitting and kind of next steps?
Charlie Nelson: Yeah, definitely. And so look, you know, the asset itself, I mean, it's 438 acres nestled in between 2 giant power plants. One's the Vistra Ector County generating stations, roughly 1.1 gigs. And Calpine's right next door at 550 megawatts. And so already right there, you know, that drives the nexus of a whole bunch of infrastructure that makes life really easy when you're trying to develop the stuff. Because look, it's not just like, you know, building a data center isn't just like throwing a dart on a map and hoping you have the right infrastructure. Like the site selection that occurs just on the front end of the entire process is incredibly, it's involved and you can You can do it right, you can do it wrong. This is a top tier asset when you're trying to build something like this. What we've done is really, I mentioned the strength through partnership model. Look, we don't need to do everything ourselves. So we've brought in a few partnerships just to highlight. We've brought in Thunderhead, which is a private equity-backed, infra-backed developer of power infrastructure, and we're giving them a power island to go build asset, the power island one. And really, what we're going to do on Power Island 1 is build up to the standard permit limit, which is about 450 megawatts of IT load. And it's pretty straightforward to get that in. The standard permit process in Texas is incredibly intuitive, and we have fallen what's called an attainment zone, which makes it even easier. There's attainment and non-attainment. So it just makes-- happy to nerd out on what that means exactly, but really, it just makes your life easier as far as getting stuff built quickly. And so, and then in parallel to that.
Will Gray: And that's where your air permitting side, Cash, specifically on that.
Charlie Nelson: Yeah. Yeah. So when you're building power plants, say, yeah, that's obviously the critical long pole in the tent. So, you know, we've partnered with them. We're deploying a series of smaller units. We're talking small, they're called resips and turbines. I'm sure everyone's heard of these things before, but we elected to go with the design on smaller units there, specifically because when you're designing infrastructure for behind the meter power for a data center, if I'm just trying to build a power plant normally, I'm going to go build the largest single unit, like a combined cycle plant that's like 300 or 600 megawatts. And those are made by like GE, Vernova or Siemens or someone like that. And that's like logic stands for reason in a normal power development, that's what you would do. You know, the issue is, is that the uptime reliability on a data center, we need at least 99.9% reliability, ideally 99.999% reliability, which, you know, when you look at a standard power plant, it has roughly about a 95 to a 98% uptime reliability. So there's actually an incongruence in those larger plants compared to what we're doing. So we, you know, we did an enormous amount of design iteration with involvement and feedback from hyperscalers like working on these designs saying, you know, Does this make sense for your needs as a chip operator within our asset? And where we ended is a situation where we've spec'd out exactly this layout that can provide that reliability factor because, again, downtime is very expensive in a data center. You don't want to have it. The difference between 99 and 99.9 is huge in terms of revenue. The so, yeah, we've got so we've got all that specked out, got all that, you know, already already in process. And, you know, in addition to that, we've partnered with a group called Maugen Capital, which provides what's called the Digital Zero PPA. So it offsets a lot of the emissions associated with with normal like natural gas production, normal natural gas power. So you kind of greenify the power, if you will, which is, you know, tangibly a good story to have, obviously. You know, the asset has, you know, great fiber connectivity. We've got three pipelines that are servicing the site. And that's important, again, for reliability, because, you know, if you're serviced by one pipeline, a pipeline can go down, you know, every three years they've been on for routine maintenance for like three weeks at a time. And that's hugely detrimental. And so we need to have backup options. And so, you know, for that reason, the reliability and redundancy factor that that provides is really critical. And by the way, you know, In the discussions with hyperscalers, you know, that's become a focal point, honestly. And so, you know, we kind of do that ahead of time, designed for it ahead of time, and kind of solved the problem before people really knew it was a problem.
Will Gray: If you want me to say so, I don't mean to speak over, but one thing I think differentiates a lot of us, I mean, I think everyone knows out there, there's 100, 100 of land, you know, powered land guys out there saying, Hey, I got access, you know, to a NatGas line. You know, there's a 365 line in close proximity. Hey, we're going to build a big data center. And it doesn't work that way. And I think for the layperson, they don't understand. Just because there's a gas transmission line that's adjacent to your property does not mean you can get access to that line, because those gas molecules may be spoken for. And so what we had to do before we ever did anything was to understand, it was how much gas can we actually pull off of these existing lines? Because like I said earlier, Cash, part of my history and my success is coming from, let's not reinvent the wheel, right? Let's go do what people have done previously and go put our own twist on it. So for instance, the easiest place to find oil is where it already exists. And this holds true for power. This easiest place to build power is where it already exists. So as Charlie alluded to, you have these three existing intrastate lines. Actually, one of those lines, the one of line, traverses the lower portion of the 438 acres. And so prime example, we've already been in, I mean, this is so far down the road, it's not even funny, because we had to understand exactly down to the, you know, MCF, what can we pull off of each line? So for instance, on the One Oak line, we can have access to 100 million a day of gas. And that equates, just think of this, 80 million a day equates to 400 megawatts. That's the sort of, you know, so we can start looking at those terms. And then on the enterprise line, that lies just to the eastern flank of our asset, 1/4 of a mile, we have access to 200 million a day. And then the third line, the Whistler Whitewater, another potential 100 million a day. So there you have three line taps. And I think that's what really kind of separates this project is that one, we have the ability to have firm, to take firm capacity of this, of the gas to make it work. And I think that's one of our differentiating factors is we just don't go out here and say, hey, we've got 3 gas lines. Well, that's great, but what are you going to do with those gas lines? So I think, you know, just from an educational standpoint, Everyone gets the grid. But I think, you know, we really want to help educate the market and investors to, you know, to differentiate what's real and what's not. Because there's a lot of, there's a lot of, you know, crap out there that's being spun, if that makes sense. Charlie, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
Charlie Nelson: No, I mean, look, it's a valid point of differentiation, because our revenue model is not flipping powered land, and a lot of what people call data center developers are really powered land developers. You know, like while they can, you know, there are some that are successful, there's also like, you know, everyone, every farmer with a power line running through their property right now thinks that they've got a data center property. And that's just like, and it's just not the case because, you know, there may not be capacity on there. There's a whole bunch of factors. And so really, you know, as we're going through this, you know, and as we're going through these developments, basically it's our job to create a series of de-risking steps until we reach a final investment decision. And that's what we've been doing. And building credibility for ourselves, for the project, for the asset, every single step that we take is meaning to de-risk this in the eyes of infrastructure investors and, you know, the end customers, which is, you know, basically the MAG 7. And so, you know, like continuing on kind of where, you know, where we left off, you know, so we hired The like a top tier engineering firm in the data center space has been around, you know, been doing this for, you know, 30 years called EYP. They're now a division of a large engineering firm called Ramble. But, you know, they've designed 75 million square feet of data centers that are operational today all across the globe. And so, you know, again, it's aligning the right engineering firms, you know, for, you know, studying the grid, doing our large load work. We brought on a group called Electric Power Engineers, same group that you know, on core, center point uses, et cetera, to conduct this work for us and act on our behalf. And so, you know, quite a bit of what we are doing in general is just, you know, basically doing a series of these de-risking steps by, you know, aligning ourselves with the right partners, you know, following the right execution philosophies that allow us to basically convince, you know, our tenants, of which we're, you know, we're under exclusive, and negotiating leases right now, how we got here is basically just a series of credibility gap crossing. And that's what it takes for a company to enter into this space. You can't just go in here willy-nilly. You have to be very methodical about how these are designed because these are expensive assets. And as you mentioned, you said 450 is a big number. The plan here is to then bump that up on phase two to over a gig. And so, you know, while 450 is large, a gig is obviously bigger. And so, yeah, like, so in essence, I mean, right now, you know, we've already crossed the threshold of the phase one engineering well into phase two and multiple design review sessions on the actual data centers themselves. And it's been, that's an iterative process on like how dense do we need the compute to be for this specific. tenant and what do we need this to look like? And so we've settled on that. And really everything that we're doing is solving for the technical, making sure that we've got the right designs that are suitable for our tenant to install stuff in, making sure that we've got the right execution strategy on power, making sure that those two come online at the same time because one to be online before the other. And so it's a bit of a coordination there. And then working through all the commercial aspects of it leading up into the financial aspects of of going out and getting this thing closed and going FID, which we plan on doing next year, early on, it's basically late Q1, maybe early Q2, I mean, and is the anticipation. So yeah, so that's kind of what we've been doing. It's really like building something like this and developing something like this, it's not that different than anything else that we've done in the past. It's just different layouts and different attributes of it that you need to solve for and design around. But yeah, I mean, we feel as though with the right partnerships, surrounding ourselves with the right minds, designing this thing, thinking through this thing, we've got great advisors that have guided us towards the specific stuff, not just for asset one, but also what does our expansion look like? What does the market need for assets two and beyond? And those are being taken into account as we're kind of moving forward. I'm going to stop there. We've been doing a lot of talking on our side.
Will Gray: But Cass, one thing that we haven't addressed that you did ask, because this was really interesting. So obviously, we had mentioned that we've done a number of non-deal roadshows, and I've spoken with a multitude of different institutional investors last week. And it was like kind of our introduction. It's like, OK, it's like this coming out, this introduction of the World Party. And we've been flying so far under the radar. And obviously you made a, your initial comment was, our evaluation relative to some of our peer comps. And I think, what we learned very quickly last week was these institutions, they really didn't understand our business model nor how to value us. And I think, that is really, and so I think, today we want to provide some clarity of, okay, Who are we? What do we do? How do we generate cash? And I think, Charlie, I think that's probably, you did a really great job last week of articulating to these, you know, very large institutions that manage billions under AUM on what it is we do. Do you mind just kind of giving, you know, everyone just a brief overview of what it is that we do?
Charlie Nelson: And really quick, before I dive into that, Kash, I mean, look, we've been talking a lot on our side. Anything specific you want to touch on that we've covered already there, or before we kind of dive into the business model and get a little more clarity there?
Kash: Yeah, just before we jump into the business model, the core business model, I think it's worth just pausing and just addressing a few questions that are coming up. I see a few hands up. I've got one important burning question on my end to kick it off, and then maybe we'll just go through a few folks here on the line and then kick it back over to you guys just to make sure we've got all the right questions at the right times. Okay.
Charlie Nelson: Totally.
Kash: So on the... Just a quick technical point here, Charlie, if you wouldn't mind going on mute when you're not speaking, I think we're getting a little bit of background noise on your end, if that's not too much trouble. Awesome. So on the Sharon AI JV, I understand that to be a 50-50 structure on TCDC alone. Is that limited to the first 250 megawatts? Because that's kind of what I'd understood at the outset, but now you're already talking about a 450 megawatt stage, phase one build out. How should one think about that?
Will Gray: So that's a great point, guys, because I think that was some, there was some confusion as well among some of the institutional investors. So it's essentially at the asset level, right? So at the TCDC level, whether that's five, you know, 5 megawatts or 5 gigawatts at that site. So think of them at that.
Kash: Got it.
Will Gray: Yeah. So if that makes sense. Now, again, it's ring-fenced around that 438 acres. So for instance, asset #2, that is 100% NUAI.
Kash: Got it. That's super helpful. Bitcoin Butcher, I saw your hand up first. Why don't you go ahead?
₿itcoin ₿utcher: Averett and Charlie, I appreciate your guys' time this afternoon. I'm a little less familiar with behind the meter as our primary investments that we've discussed are front of the meter operations. Specifically, I'm curious, you guys have addressed redundancy very well in what differentiates you from other powered land operators with your access to three pipelines and that you're able to quantify how much gas can come in. My only question related to that is, is it fair to say that the gas is owned by someone else, meaning you don't have mineral rights. Like, is there any threat to even though you're able to transmit that gas in, would there ever be a reason why supply of that might compromise being able to power the generators? Thanks for your time, guys.
Charlie Nelson: Well, I'm I'm happy to take that. Yeah, look, yeah, you know, it it's, It's pretty standard to buy gas off of these systems on a long-term basis and fix your supply. So that's pretty common. It's actually more uncommon to vertically integrate all the way into the resource. So if you go build any type of assets, you know, even the power plants that are adjacent to us, they don't own the resource that supplies them. So, I mean, all of that's just handled through long-term contracts on guaranteed supply. And so, yeah, that's a very standard way to do it. So it's governed by what's called a NASB. And, but yeah, that's a good question. But ultimately, you know, again, this area is drowning in gas. It will continue to be drowning in gas. There's no, gas production is actually continuing to go up over time because what's called the gas-oil ratio. goes up, that means the amount of gas compared to the amount of oil coming out of these wells goes up over time. So yeah, I mean, right now, this area, and that's one of the reasons why, you know, we selected this area was because of the rateability of supply both today and like 15 years from now. You know, it's so, but very good question. And yeah, that's handled all through contracts.
Kash: Thanks, guys. Marcos, you're up next.
Marcos: Hi, guys. Thank you for taking my question. I was curious if you saw Google released, well, a Google-backed research was released, I think, last week with Camus, Encord, and Princeton University. And it was a research about the BYOC of the future flexible data centers. So what it's going to deliver them in incremental costing saves, but also time to market. According to that research, it would cut times to market to around three to five years. So I was curious because you talked in the beginning already about the BOYC model. Do you see it in line? Are you targeting the three to five year acceleration into the data center build out? And adding to that, and I think you're going to cover this a little bit later when explaining the business model, does the BYOC style, how does it affect your business model in terms of what revenue is coming in and and your control on that. Thank you, guys.
Charlie Nelson: Yeah, so, I mean, there's kind of two factors to consider. There's the power build out, and then there's the actual data center build out, which includes all the supporting electrical infrastructure, et cetera, that is integral to the facility itself. Right now, as our current engineering schedules are laid out, we're looking at basically an 18-month build cycle. is what is what's currently being and that's you know that's not coming from us that's coming from you know the you know the folks that we have hired to to do this and and so yeah the I mean the the numbers that are being quoted there it really depends on on what you're doing. So there's you know if you have to drop down from like a 345 KB to a 345 which is. distribution voltage to all the data center buildings and you know that gets trapped to 13.8 and 480 all like there's a whole bunch of switches and whatnot and transforms that happen at the data center level. There's long lead times that are driving some of those three to five year numbers that are being quoted you know for for new data centers and a lot of that is is is utility drop down. And because those those are just long lead time pieces of equipment. I mean in these projects it it frankly at any I mean, your critical path is generally what it's referred to as. I mean, you could be delayed by a single piece of equipment, like a single transformer, for example. And so what we're doing to get around that and accelerate that, I mean, there's a couple things on the data center building design that we're doing. We can cover a little bit, but for the most part, it's long lead on transformers. We don't have to, to start this facility up, we don't have to have a 345 to 34.5 transformer because our power is generated at 13.8 and stepped up to 34.5 and then distributed. So it actually, you know, we've got somewhat of a shortcut there, if you will. But yeah, so like we're anticipating a startup right now as it's being quoted of sometime in the second-half of 27. And so that's that's full build out. You know it's going to be a wild 18 months during that build out process, but that's that's our current anticipated startup.
Kash: Awesome stock meetups.
Speaker 3: I have a few questions. So first question is around when is your load and energizing ready and when do you see that you're first and using it? The second one is I I'm very curious around your strategy around 99.99, you know, are you going to use any batteries or your like different strategies for the disaster recovery? The third one is around gas turbines have around four years lead time right now. Is it true or if it's true, then what is your strategy to when you want to scale up?
Charlie Nelson: So let's get those points one by one. So the first point, the, again, the power, the first power up is going to be in conjunction with the startup and the COD commercial operation date of the facility, which we're expecting at the end of twenty-seven or like the second-half of twenty-seven. Some of that is informed, so you talk about the reliability factors on this. Going back to that comment that we were talking about on the facility design, this kind of addresses questions two and three. The long lead times that everyone is seeing on turbines, as they're being referred to commonly in the market, is turbines for, like those are the large combined cycle turbines. So those are the 300 to 600 megawatt, you know, GE Vernova Siemens units. And those do have a longer lead time. We have elected to do a series of smaller units. These are 5 to 25 megawatt units that get installed in parallel. We're talking, you know, hundreds of these things that will end up being installed in parallel. And so the reason why we do that, 'cause you know, again, in a normal infrastructure plan, that would be a kind of a ridiculous idea, frankly. But because the unit, so like, let's just talk in terms of, you know, the like the five megawatt units. So if we're trying to solve for, you know, 450 megawatts of those, that's 90 of those units. And then you install, you know, well here, if you're installing the big one to get to that reliability factor, I mean, for the most part, You either have to do what's called an N 1 philosophy, which means you basically have to double it, and on the big ones, which becomes cost prohibitive and burdensome. When you're doing it on the smaller ones, we have to install about 20% extra. And that extra is just this bank of them that is just sitting there idling, waiting for one of the units that's running to go down. And by the way, these are highly reliable units. So typically speaking, these units sit in the corner of an asset and run, you change the oil every once in a while, and they're pretty good to go. And you do routine overhauls and routine maintenance on them. So, for example, to achieve that redundancy factor, let's say that three of them go down. Well, within 10 seconds, three of our backups will immediately initiate and make up the load. Then you take the three that went down, put them in a maintenance cycle, and bring them back online. And so by doing that, we're actually able to achieve better reliability factors with lower overall cost, which is counterintuitive. Again, if you're just designing for a power plant, you build the big ones. If you're designing for a power plant, just feeding a data center directly that requires high reliability, we went with a different design that is specifically tailored to this solution. You asked about batteries, there will be batteries involved. Some of that, they don't have to be large, but frankly, some of these, you really nerd out on what does the power look like and the signal. If you've got 90 of these units running and all their pistons are hammering or their turbines are spinning at different rates, you get kind of a mixed power signal. We're using what's called a ride-through battery to be able to stabilize that because that can impact the loads. And so that's also been a factor in our design. And but yeah, like, you know, the nice part about the smaller units is that these are more readily available. You can you can get them new and or used refurbed. There's there's quite a honestly quite a robust market for them. And so that's what what we've done to to kind of get this stuff, you know, get this, you know, get this going quicker than these longer lead times that you'd see in the past.
Speaker 3: Thanks for the explanation. I'm like really impressed how you're thinking because I also work in large scale distributor systems in my company. Hey, one last question on the same topic. So you solve the problem. At least I'm convinced on the distribution system and the failover and disaster recovery once you have the gas. But how are you going to solve the disaster recovery of the if one of the gas wells are down? Do you have a backup or so?
Charlie Nelson: Yeah, so these are. Yeah, these aren't connected directly to the wells. So to be clear, we're this asset in any asset that we're build is going to be tied into multiple redundant large transmission lines. So these transmission. Yeah.
Will Gray: That was from our thesis originally, right? We don't want to build next to just one line because one line will go down. over, just for, picking or things of that nature over a three-year period. That's why we have three separate line taps because we...
Speaker 3: I see.
Will Gray: Yeah, and then we kind of, plan them forwardly, right? So we're looking out years in advance to understand when those maintenances are scheduled.
Speaker 3: Awesome, thank you.
Charlie Nelson: Yep, good questions.
Kash: Thanks, guys. Maybe we'll come back... to questions in a moment again. We'll turn it over to you again, Charlie and Will, on talking through how you think about your core business strategy and value proposition. I think that's where you were headed next. And where I really want to go with this is, and really the crux of the discussions for me are around the hyperscaler discussions. That's one. And 2, the financing elements of this, because as a largely a retail investor race here, the number one concern, or rather thing on the radar, is dilution and how do you navigate that. So we'll take those in order, starting first with how you think about your core business.
Will Gray: So Charlie, why don't you speak on core business? I'll speak on the finance aspect.
Charlie Nelson: Perfect. Yeah, so, I mean, look, the core business, data centers are inherently like a light industrial commercial real estate asset. You build a building, you lease it out, you do a triple net lease, long-term, stable, and the quality of that lease is highly dependent upon the balance sheet on the other side of it. And that's gonna factor into kind of what Will's gonna talk about on the financing side of it. So, you know, our core business model is tripled at leases and either royalties on power sales from partners or on the power sales themselves if we build it ourselves. And so the buildings have their own, like the data center buildings have their own revenue model, the power assets have their own revenue model and combined those make up the revenue model of the total asset. And then Will, I mean, you kind of want to talk to your like the project equity, project debt, all that stuff?
Will Gray: Yeah, but for us to be specific, we're not going to own the PowerGen. So that's going to be owned from one of our partners. So again, our revenue is tripping will come from a triple net lease. That's pretty much how to look at this model. And so essentially, the power is just a password. So I don't want people to, because again, you know, you're looking at 1.4 to 2 million per MW on the PowerGen side. It's a lot of CapEx. So that will not be coming from our side of the, that'll come from one of our one of our partnerships. Now, when you start looking at the revenue, because Cash, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, you're looking at anywhere from, oh gosh, 9 to 13 million, 14 million per megawatt on the build out of the data center. So just for ease of math, let's just say we're using 10 million a megawatt and we're doing, you know, 500 megs. There's $5 billion. Five to $7 billion, right? So for our company at a 200 million market cap. And I think this is where we did a really good job of explaining on how we addressed this with institutional investors last week. So essentially, just an overview, just for 2025, there was $125 billion raised for project finance data centers. For 2026, that number has already been maxed, already looking out for Q3. So for us, we're looking at this as kind of an off-balance off-balance sheet, financing mechanism at the asset level, right, at the general partnership, which is TCDC. So ideally, what we want to do is have the end tenant, the balance sheet that would provide 85% finance at the asset level, and then, you know, the balance raised at project level equity. Now, obviously, you know, they're going to want some sort of a commit from the GP, which is Texas Critical Data Center. So that could be anywhere from one to 3%. And that would be split 50/50 between NU AI and sharing AI. So ideally, what we're trying to do is get the biggest bang for our buck with the least amount of share issuance, any sort of dilution. But again, the sort of IRRs that we're looking at here are astronomical. I think, you know, I think most everyone understands what that model looks like. And so for us, we're not having to go out and raise a billion dollars at top level of cash, if that makes sense.
Kash: Yeah, maybe just unpack that a bit more. So you're going to get product level financing. Correct. 85% or so funded by the incoming tenant.
Will Gray: No, I take that back. So obviously we're going to utilize the balance sheet from the incoming tenant. We'll go out to the different funds that invest. So the tenant will not pay for that. We go out there and we raise the financial plan.
Charlie Nelson: Yeah, think about it like we secure long-term lease and basically that's our secured revenue turns into like a securitized revenue stream at which we can borrow against and the quality of the counterparty providing that guarantee like ties directly into what the project financing package can look like in terms of debt equity ratios, things like that. But any major infrastructure, and this doesn't just apply to data centers, this applies to just about any major infrastructure, this is generally how it works. raising top co equity to pay for massive infrastructure is just massively dilutive. And there's very tried and true mechanisms that we're following that can avoid and minimize that.
Kash: Yeah, understood. And that's consistent with my thinking coming into this conversation, which is you're basically getting rental revenue, right? Lease revenue, and then you're able to lever that to the tune of call it. you know, 85% or, you know, in extreme cases, even higher is what I've heard. But let's say 85%, 70 to 85%. The balance, you have to go out and raise equity. That is project level equity that you will raise and without issuing shares of NUAI, which in turn would dilute the existing shareholders. Correct. If you're not holding the, and so if you're raising 100, the balance, 15%, 15 to 30% of equity from a third party, right, are you effectively getting a carry structure that then flows through to the NUAI shareholders?
Charlie Nelson: Yeah, these, so- How are you, yeah. So basically, the entire model is built on and predicated on what's called a yield on cost model. So like when we go out and do these, like when we're negotiating the lease right now, you negotiate a yield on cost and then you have basically a true up mechanism on COD. So you make a base assumption based on projected costs and then there's a yield paid during construction to equity and then that yield changes upon operations. And so but that yield is paid. And so the yield that you're talking about is effectively the carry. So I think that's answering your question. Will, do you have any thoughts on that?
Will Gray: No, you're spot on. Cash, does that answer the question?
Kash: So the yield on cost-- so you've got a revenue number, let's say it's $100. The yield-- or rather, your cost is $100. and you want the implied yield on cost is calculated with your tenant and finalized at COD? Am I?
Charlie Nelson: Yes. Yes, and that's not unique to us. That's across the data center space for the most part. That's how these deals are structured.
Kash: Okay, perfect. Now let's say your yield is $10, okay, escalating at CPI. That's sort of a 10% yield, again, just for easy numbers. But you have still yet to fund your equity portion of the transaction, right? Meaning you've got this lease revenue of 110, for which you have to go out and raise debt and equity to build out your facility. You're going to raise 85% of debt. The balance 15%, you have to raise equity. Would that wouldn't that incremental $10 go to the equity holders? How does how do NUAI shareholders get paid in that equation?
Charlie Nelson: Yeah, so the money flows up through a like a distribution. vehicle. So equity gets paid, obviously debt gets paid, and then there's yield paid. And this is where you can kind of flex because there's, and depending on who you bring in, the cash flow on day one versus cash flow after first turn on equity versus what's called a fully footed forward takeout model. There's a lot of different options you can do to drive revenue early on, but typically speaking, You know, there there is a there is a yield component that's paid to the like we are essentially the GPs and otherwise what's called an opco propco structure. And and so there there is accounting for cash flow, you know, on day one before equity is paid back and then the then the the cash flow. that it shifts after different tranches. So sometimes that's a waterfall structure that gets paid out. You know, again, we're just getting into that because right now where we're at in the development, it wouldn't be expected to have the project equity lined up because you kind of have to bake the project a bit and get everything de-risked before you go out and raise that. Frankly, you want to do that because the more baked a project is when you go out to PE and infra funds to deal with this, the further you take it, before you go to them, the better the terms you get. And because it's basically just putting risk on the table for award on the back end, which is what we're doing. And again, you know, we're already pre-marketing that fundraise, the efforts are really going to kick up in early Q1 for this specific equity and debt structure. And again, this is at the guidance of the banks that we use. But yeah, I mean, you're entirely correct. Like you're thinking about this, you're thinking about this the right way. And it's, yeah.
Kash: Yeah, okay, cool. We'll leave that one there. I think I understand exactly how you guys are approaching it. It makes a lot of sense. And so maybe let's get to the hyperscaler conversation then. You're in conversation, or you've said you've been in conversation with multiple counterparties, large-scale operators, credit-worthy operators. Maybe give us a sense for where you are in that discussion. how close you are to, you know, signing a deal. You had originally announced that it would be done this year, but it seems like it's slipping into next year. Maybe you can give us some context there.
Charlie Nelson: Well, look, I think it's very important to note that, you know, we made the election. Let's just talk historically what we've been doing. We made the election to become New Era Energy and Digital officially over the summer. And then the nature of our... of our contractual, because originally we were thinking, hey, let's do power land. And then we kind of migrated over into this powered shell concept. And so the entire contractual nature of it has evolved since we first became New Era Energy and Digital, which is good. For what it's worth, we've made some moves that have allowed us to migrate into this space, which is typically very hard to break into. But yeah, where we're at right now, I mean, we're under exclusive right now. We're actively negotiating the leases and the lease terms right now. And that is going on in parallel with an iterative loop of what's going on with the engineering and design side. So it's all kind of part and parcel together. But I mean, look, things are moving along at a solid pace right now. Actually, we have reviews on that this afternoon, so yeah, it's moving along. We can't really go out there and put projections as to when the exactly the definitive docs are gonna get signed, just because this iterative process on the design has... Yeah, you got to sharpen your pencil on this thing to make it a quality deal, and that's what we've been doing. So we don't really see it as a delay. It's just been an evolution.
Will Gray: Yeah, so Kash, and that's one thing we wanted to nail down, obviously, one is who's the intent, which hyperscaler, and two is just as important that everyone's kind of been missing is execution. How are we going to build these things? That's one thing we've not touched on, because I don't live that far from Abilene. and where Stargate's being built. And when I was driving through there a couple of weeks ago, taking my daughter to her state gymnastics competition, the interstate was shut down because you've got, what, 6,000 subcontractors, the size of a small city out there on location. So execution risk is just as great as who's going to actually occupy your data center. And so I think we have to have those two things nailed down before we go FID. So we've been spending a lot of time in conjunction with the end tenant and which manufacturer that we're gonna go with on the data center side in order to make this happen in second-half of '27.
Charlie Nelson: Yeah, and there's an important point to tap into there, by the way, 'cause one thing that we really kind of pride ourselves on is much like how we started leaning into the behind the meter power before the market was ready for it and the market caught up to the thesis. You know, we're seeing other things like this start to crop up and starting to do some planning, which has affected our design considerations. And one of those is modularization of the data center itself. So, you know, right now that Abilene project, that's Stargate, massive amount of contractors. We're talking, again, as Will mentioned, you're mobilizing a small city. These are a lot of electrical contractors, and that's just one project. You know, you've got... You know, you've got another project, frankly, in Abilene that's starting to bid up the labor pool there. You're probably going to have another, I don't know, four to five of these mega projects under construction basically at the same time and really in the same window that we're looking at it. And and, you know, it's the same. It's a similar crunch to what we ran into back in 2010 to 2014 during the large scale midstream build out where welding labor and mechanical construction labor was significantly pinched. And it became a barrier to entry just to be able to actually execute on the projects themselves. And so what we've done to alleviate this is that we're leaning into a, you know, at the advice of some, you know, pretty, let's just call it legendary players in the space that have, you know, built some massive.
Will Gray: It's to be announced, by the way, Cash. So there you go. So we'll.
Charlie Nelson: Yeah.
Kash: Oh, you're leaving?
Charlie Nelson: Yeah.
Kash: But the. Wanting more here, but yeah. Yeah.
Charlie Nelson: Well, look.
Will Gray: There you go. So that's what we do, right?
Charlie Nelson: I love it. But yeah, I mean, like just to tap into like why we're doing this. I mean, look, we're seeing what's probably going to be an electrical contracting labor pinch coming in six to 12 months. I don't think there's a way around it. And so how we've resolved this is that we're leaning into these modular data center designs where you can essentially prefab modules that are pre-wired and you do that in a factory kind of Henry Ford style. And you get those things built. And this, again, third party that does this right now, they've already executed on projects like this. I mean, this is a bit of a scale jump for them, but it's just, you know, they have the capacity in-house to do this. But really what this will do is it'll cut down site construction labor by about 80%. And so, and we believe that this is probably the future. Like, you know, if the build continues, the data center build out continues at the pace it's going to, we just believe that this is going to be the future. You know, it's modularized versus stick build in the field. And so, and again, everything that we're doing, by the way, like all of these, all of these considerations we're doing on asset one. are translatable and will allow us to execute faster on assets to and beyond because we've already done it.
Will Gray: That's the whole process, right? Rinse and repeat. That's what we want to do here.
Charlie Nelson: That's correct. Yeah. Design once, cut many times. And so that's really what we're leaning into on the execution philosophy. And that's been a lot of the design review with the hyperscaler as well as it's just a bunch of back and forth on like, does this make sense? Does this work? Here's what we're proposing. And look, it's been a positive feedback loop And, but yeah, I mean, that's a lot of what we're doing here is kind of leaning into that. So just wanted to tap on that real quick.
Will Gray: That's one thing I, you know, you read the chat, but listen, Charlie, you think you don't read the chat boards? Oh my gosh, we know exactly what our investors are saying. And so, you know, but I will, there was one thread last time on Stock Quiz where I was gifted my shares, it doesn't work that way. I was in the company for five years and I pretty much earned those shares, so it's not like I was just, I had a silver spoon, but long story short, it's like one thing that we will do is execute, not just on delivering an end tenant, I mean, but what's the point of having an end tenant if we can't go COD? So I think, you know, we're thinking six moves ahead, not just kind of like, hey, let's go sign an end tenant and make a PR announcement. That doesn't do any good, sorry.
Kash: Yeah, you guys have been around the block long enough to know. Long enough. Probably enough, every which way you guys are gonna get screwed on execution.
Will Gray: Yeah.
Kash: So one thing I've, you know, in all your commentary in the public is your ability to mitigate that risk, or at least you're constantly thinking about it. Obviously everybody's waiting with a bit of breath on your execution strategy post announcement of the tenant. So not putting the cart before the horse here, tenant announcement first and then execution. I think that's gonna be very critical as you guys demonstrate that. And that's been very impressive. You guys are, how big now? How many people on your team today?
Will Gray: Well, see, and that's just it, Cass. That's a great point. I was gonna bring that up. I mean, we're small, we're like six people, but again, how many consultants, what, 25, 30 consultants that we're interfacing with? And the idea was, why would we're not gonna bring those W-2, because all of a sudden, from a G&A perspective, that's crazy. You know what? It's like baby steps. Let's crawl before we walk. Why are we going to introduce additional costs until we have, you know, FID? So until then, we're going to keep, you know, we've got everyone identified who we're going to bring on full time. I mean, we'll go from, you know, that six, seven to 30 overnight.
Kash: Got it. Got it. And you're focused there. Well, I mean, you're obviously outsourcing the power side of it, right? So you're going to get a developer there on the power side. Obviously, your job primarily is to line up all the contracts for execution. So on the power side, on the feedstock side, on the construction side. What role do you guys actually play? I mean, you're obviously orchestrating this whole thing to come together. Is your role a GC type role or is it even further up as just purely the developer? You then hire a GC who then subcontracts a bunch of the trades out to get the job done.
Charlie Nelson: We are the developer. Yeah, we're a developer now. Every asset starts as a development and moves into operations. And so, for example, when building a chemicals business before, started out with basically three staff and, developed out, because early on... You coordinate a bunch of external counterparties. It's everything from coordinating engineering, legal, commercial, finance, land acquisition, all of the things that are required. So our day-to-day right now is just, I mean, it is going from one thing to another and maestroing all of these different aspects to coordinate together. to get to a final investment decision. So in any in any development, your job is to de-risk everything as cheaply as possible, but as effectively as possible upstream leading up to a final investment decision. And that's what we're doing. We're in we're in the like the later stages of the development phase. Once you go final investment decision, you you go into construction phase. And so, you know, you bring on some folks to help manage their construction, project management staff, stuff like that. And making sure, you know, Will said, you know, key hires identified, et cetera, like, you know, you make sure that during that construction phase that, you know, again, you've got a little bit bigger team, but it's not to like operations big yet. You know, you're basically coordinating a bunch of like, as you mentioned, GCs, you're talking, you know, coordinating the power with the data center build and the, you know, there's a whole bunch of different coordinators that occurs in that phase different than the development phase. And then, you know, leading up to operations is really like, you know, historically speaking, I started hiring people out of six months before operations and really get everyone just kind of trained up. And that's like, you know, at that point in time, you have everything from your, you know, scalable ERP systems and, you yada, yada, yada, all the infrastructure that you need to then move into actual operations. And that's everything from operations accounting to actual physical operations down to security on the assets. So there's a whole layer that comes in there, but you don't like, the idea is don't bring on that stuff earlier than you need to. You bring it on logically as as is required to make sure the project is successful in each phase, and that's development, construction, operations.
Will Gray: Cash, I've made that mistake previously in my career where I brought on way too much staff before the wells were drilled, and it's just ridiculous. It's just a burn. So I think we have great consultants, and not to mention what we learn from these consultants, because they're also working with other data centers too, by the way. So to me, it's like we're getting kind of a peek in the inside of what's going on in other parts of the country right now. So it's been quite, it's been really good for the company.
Kash: I think that's prudent pacing. I think, but you guys will be running like, you know, with your hair on fire.
Will Gray: The second the- If I had hair, it would be.
Kash: Sure, if you had the luxury, you know, as soon as the tenant is announced. But no, I totally understand. I did want to, you know, give you guys the opportunity to touch on one more area before we do just a bit of Q&A to close out the session. You folks have announced the second project, which is, you know, a multi-gigawatt scale project that's predicated on an SMR, small modular reactor technology build-out. Could you give us some some context there, why announce so early when you're so early in the development phase, only to the extent that you can, of course. And then talk us a bit through that technology and why you think that's a viable technology?
Will Gray: So real quick, Charlie, here's the thing. So Charlie, just please realize we've got 20 minutes left because Charlie can geek out on SMR technology for like four hours. I swear to let Charlie go on that because that happened on calls last week, but real quick, we did announce that. We did announce the New Mexico asset #2 is because we wanted to let the market know we're not a one trick pony. We have other, we're able to execute and identify other top tier assets within the Permian and even beyond. So with that being said, again, it was a 7 gigawatt, that's kind of initially what we're looking at, 2 gigawatts of nat gas. five of SMR technology. But Charlie, I'll let you have a very concise overview of how you feel that your SMR has been fit into our strategy here.
Charlie Nelson: Yeah. Well, I mean, look, first thing, just address it. Like, you know, we make these announcements to keep people informed. You know what I mean? So it's one of these things that we just believe in good communication. So that's why the announcement was made. You know, in general, so, you know, that asset right now, we're slotting that to be about two gigs of gas at full build. And then we're, you know, we're throwing out, you know, five gigs of nuclear. And the nuclear, so like there's kind of two ways to talk nuclear. There's, you know, historical like Westinghouse AP1000 designs, which that's like what the Vogel plant in Georgia was based on. And then there's, you know, all of these new SMR technologies that are coming about. Look, you know, my view on SMRs, like I like SMRs that are in the 20 to 50 megawatt range. There's 10 companies that are basically rushing to get their first commercial demonstration units online by next summer. You know, we could talk about that, that handful of lists there. You know, some of those, some of those companies fall in that, that what I consider the sweet spot to be 20 to 50 megawatts. And why do I like that? Well, so like the, the evolution of SMRs for the next five years is going to be everyone brings on their commercial demonstration, curves it out, everyone claps, applauds, whatever. Well, then if you want to deliver gigawatts a year on this type of technology, they have to build their version of a gigafactory, essentially. That build cycle is going to take a little while. It's not going to happen overnight. So some are optimistically said that they could start deliveries in 29. We're probably banking on 30. 31. But, you know, for right now, what we have to do, because there's there is an accelerated program with with Chris Wright, you know, coming into the head of the DOE, you know, he's for what it's worth, he used to sit on the board of Oklo. And the there's a new pathway for permitting and regulatory for for nukes that basically it's like if it's of national strategic significance and importance, you can get a 18 month DOE permit rather than the historical very long duration NRC permit, which is what we'll be pursuing, the former will be pursuing, because AI training and AI data centers fall into that of national strategic importance. So, you know, what we're doing right now, you know, we're going through the technology selection process on this. We're intimately familiar with all the technologies out there, and it may be a few different techs that we deploy there. But yeah, look, you know, SMRs, as soon as the gigafactory concept starts materializing, I think we're going to, the conversation around SMRs is going to be a lot less like, do these things work? And it's like how, it's just basically going to turn into the same conversation around NatGas gensets that we're having right now. Where it's like, what's your delivery schedule? You just plop them in a row, install a whole bunch of them. And And the reason why we like these is that, you know, critically important, you know, AP1000s consume a lot of water, which is why historically nukes are built on waterways, rivers, you know, on coasts, et cetera. You know, a lot of these SMR designs are essentially water free, which allows you to build better in different climates. But really, like when it comes down to SMR tech, and again, I don't wanna nerd out too hard here, 'cause we can go real deep into this. Yeah, there's right technologies in SMR that are going to go into the right applications. And frankly, I just think that those are going to triage themselves into the right applications.
Will Gray: So, Kash, that's basically the rationale for us going to SMRs is because of Charlie's background, because he understands what makes perfect sense of where this is going. And we're thinking 6 steps ahead. And so if we're not thinking about SMRs, if any data center developers, not even SMRs, they're not doing their job.
Kash: Yeah, there's such a large deficit of power to meet the demand. It makes perfect sense that, you'd be thinking about all sorts of solutions, particularly given the lead time here. Yeah, I mean, we're.
Will Gray: Not gas guys, we get it, but we're also, listen, we're energy guys. So that's what, that's what, that's the focus here. So.
Kash: Awesome. Awesome. Well, that's great, guys. Appreciate you sticking on maybe for another 10 minutes or so, 10, 15 minutes just to go some Q&A. Bitcoin mining stock guy, you've had your hand up. Why don't you jump on with a question?
₿itcoin ₿utcher: Hey, general question. So I apologize if you already answered this, but I have a couple of questions. Number one, how much power do you have today, Energize? What's in your development pipeline?
Charlie Nelson: Yeah, I mean, we're starting from scratch, as mentioned. So no operational power under the New Era umbrella today. This is a development company in its current form.
₿itcoin ₿utcher: OK. And hypothetically, let's say you have a gigawatt today. How many megawatts can you develop, let's say, on a monthly basis, once you're iterating on this?
Charlie Nelson: I wouldn't really think about it like monthly. You know, like, for example, our first tranche of power is going to be 450 megawatts at, you know, at the TCDC site. Whenever we're developing power, it's always going to follow a similar mechanism. It's always going to be putting the basically maxing out what we can do under a standard permit at the asset and then pursuing the permit that would allow us to build at a significantly larger scale, which usually takes 18 to 20 four months additional, but closer to the 18. That's what's referred to as a PSD permit. And so the so yeah, like, look, it's, you know, it's not like we're just going to keep adding like small increments over and over again. Like each of these is a a fixed large tranche development that will go in like multiple phases to completion. Like TCDC is likely just going to be two phases. You know, assets two is probably going to sit somewhere in the three to five phases.
Will Gray: And with your with your intent tenants ability to require the various data halls as well.
Charlie Nelson: Yeah, no one just builds like a gate. No one just builds a gigawatt in one phase. It hasn't really been done. You know, most people didn't.
Kash: If I can just just.
Charlie Nelson: Yep.
Kash: Sorry, didn't mean to step on either, Charlie, but if I understood that correctly, phase one, 450 megawatts all deployed in one shot and then phase two, which gets you up to a gig plus?
Charlie Nelson: Yep.
Kash: Is that right? And then 450 megawatts is directionally 18 months out to energy organization.
Charlie Nelson: Yeah, from FID.
Kash: From FID, yeah. So end of Q1, early Q2 is what I heard.
Charlie Nelson: Yeah.
Kash: OK. Cool. All right, Marcos, over to you.
Marcos: Hi, guys. First of all, compliments on the execution strategy. I really like the lean approach, which was talked about. I heavily believe in modular building and not a lot of staff to coordinate this strategy. So really like hearing that. For Charlie, I could gig out with him about SMR for a while also. I'm really interested in that space, but maybe for another time.
Charlie Nelson: Hit me up anytime you want.
Marcos: Yeah, it's really interesting with the Halle developments also and geopolitical and everything. But what I wanted to ask is some little bit more clarity on how the BIOC impacts you, because you were talking about the yield. Are you planning to own the BYOC assets yourselves or co-own them with the tenants? Or do you simply allow tenants to deploy them themselves or the third party? Because it's pretty significant.
Charlie Nelson: Are you talking about the power assets, the bring your own power deal?
Marcos: Yeah, the bring your own capacity.
Charlie Nelson: Yeah, we're gonna be providing that to our partners. So like I was mentioned, our first deal is with Thunderhead. that's been announced. You know, there's a series of companies that do this as well. You know, one of the reasons why we are where we are is that, you know, the hyperscalers, you know, their lives are complex enough as is just trying to get, you know, the GPU secured, operate all those things. And so one of the, you know, one of the things that they really like about us is that we take that on.
Will Gray: That's not to us. I mean, Charlie didn't think about that. I mean, I mean, because they want speed to power. They do not understand, the hyperscalers do they don't do this. That's not that's not what they've done. Obviously, they have the balancing to do it, but we have the background and knowledge to do it. So that's why they come to us.
Charlie Nelson: Yeah. And that'll continue to the way we can.
Marcos: So the project would be would be also specifically engineered on their needs, because every project could have different BYOC assets.
Will Gray: So obviously, you know what, that's one thing we've looked at and have learned in talking with the various household hyperscaler names, is everyone has different rack density demand, right? Some want to go super dense, some want to go medium, some want to go light. So it depends on what product is being deployed for this particular TCDC asset. So I think that's what's also driving how you manufacture lead time things of that nature, power, all of that. So for instance, if we wanted to go complete, just max out density, you could stack up two little over 2 1/2 gigs on the site. But that may not be what your intent wants, right? Because again, it depends on what product you're deploying. So ideally, what we want to do is match up the power with the intent and intent's demands.
Marcos: OK, thank you. Final question. Do you see that as yourself that you could also provide because it's project specific like a power as a service model? Because getting more sites online and maybe and close to each other, you could have you could reach some kind of orchestration position to provide power as a service across multi tenants.
Will Gray: Yeah, and we could do that.
Charlie Nelson: I mean, you know, the power as a service is one model. Look, there's companies that do power as a service. And again, our model is more on the data center side than the power side. It's just the power. We have to have the power to make the data centers work. But our intention isn't necessarily to go and compete with like Volta Grid, for example. You know, our intention is to provide a turnkey solution for that we, you know, take the development very far along, you know, before even, having the conversations with diverse scalers often just so we can come in there with a confident solution and execution plan. And that's what we're going to continue to do. I mean, that's what's needed in the market right now.
Will Gray: To Marcus's point, though, it doesn't preclude us from maybe getting some sort of a royalty or override on some of that power.
Charlie Nelson: Oh, yeah.
Will Gray: So if we facilitate the PPA with the intendant, don't get me wrong, I mean, we'd like to get some value for us and our shareholders. So I think it's kind of a What makes the perfect sense, right? We're not going to say in the future, we're not going to do that, but I think just, you know, getting, that's a whole separate business unit, right? So for right now, on asset one, it just kind of made the most sense. Asset two, TBD, right?
Marcos: Yeah, exactly. I totally, it's a future business model as well. That's what I was pointing to also.
Will Gray: No, you made a great point. You're right, because that's a lot of revenue. Yeah.
Marcos: That's a lot of revenue. And it's been very, very well paid to orchestrate that.
Will Gray: There's a reason power plant exist.
Marcos: So here you go. Yeah. OK, thank you guys for your time, and I will let other people ask a final question, maybe. Thank you. Welcome.
Kash: Yeah, I see some other folks in queue here while they're just jumping on. And only seven minutes on the clock here are six now. One point of clarification for me, the sequence of events in my mind is tenant announcement and then FID. Do I have that right?
Will Gray: Tenant announcement and also who do we utilize to manufacture the data center? Then FID.
Kash: And the separation between the two, is it a couple of months because you need to work through with the?
Will Gray: It'll be in close because this is a build to suit. This is not a spec build out, so it'll be.
Charlie Nelson: And all of these things like are are coordinated to basically all come at ahead and ideally. you know, when you're doing something like this, you don't want to execute one thing and then wait like three months and execute another. Like, so, you know, part of that day-to-day coordination that we're doing is making sure that all these things culminate at the same time. And basically, I mean, heck, you know, have a signing day. Yeah.
Kash: Yeah, that's how I envision it as well. Okay.
Charlie Nelson: Yeah.
Kash: Very good. I'm just doing a quick check here to see if there's any other questions, comments, but, barring anything here, Will, Charlie, really want to thank you for your time?
Will Gray: Can I?
Kash: This has been, yeah, go ahead, Will.
Will Gray: Yes, because this is one thing that we actually share with all of the, you know, our institutional non-goal roadshow last week was really, you know, if you like the, you know, pick and axe AI infrastructure play. then we're like the lowest entry point that there is within the marketplace. And so I think we have been flying under the radar for quite a while, and now we're just putting the name out there. So first and foremost, we want to thank each and every one of our shareholders. We have 45,000, approximately, shareholders, retail shareholders in NUAI. And I just-- I can't thank each and every one of them enough that believes in both Charlie and myself, our board, our team. This is our baby. We love it. Charlie and I talk seven days a week. I think our wife always be a little mad that, you know, it's like, okay, what's going on? It's just so much fun. And again, I can't thank everyone enough for just the belief in what we're doing and what we will accomplish. So with that, Gash, I just want to, yeah, just turn it over to you to any other points.
Kash: Yeah, it just seems like you guys are deeply discounted. will. And I think the whole point of this discussion is really to help folks realize how deep it is. Obviously, I'm starting to appreciate some of the differentials between, you know, your model, a cipher and iron, some of the more sort of better known minor to AI HPC sort of conversion place. Yours seems more, you know, sort of GPLP structure, which is very interesting. It's very capital light. And it's, you know, you really take advantage of the development capability, which is, you know, there's a lot of value there.
Will Gray: Well, look at Fermi that IPO'd at what, 15 billion and ran to what, 20 billion plus on its IPO initial date. I mean, it's still holding in there at 10 billion, you know, exact same, exact same thesis, guys.
Kash: Yeah. I will say you have a mixed group of people, some of whom love the Fermi thesis or like it.
Will Gray: I should say. I have my own analysis on that stock.
Kash: So it's-- Yeah. Look, I see a couple of hands up. We got 2 minutes, guys, to give Will and Charlie back their day. But stock meetups, you want to go first.
Speaker 3: Hey, thanks, Gray and Charlie, for your time. We learned a lot from you folks. And we'll be happy to host you folks again in a couple of months when there is an update. I know Kat and Tulsi are both in touch with you, so we'll be delighted to work with you.
Kash: Yeah, thank you. If you guys are up to doing this again, we'd love to have you guys back. And look, that's pretty much the end of our time here. I know it's been a good discussion. When you guys come back, I've got a whole nother set of questions to ask you a little bit more deeper. This was intended to be high level. by design. So we'll take it in stride. But thanks again for the time. I hope it's a best of luck on the execution here. We all really have high hopes for you.
Will Gray: Yeah, thanks again, everyone. And Charlie, thank you for joining today. And Charlie's been an amazing business partner here and getting this thing, you know, come to fruition. And just happy holidays, everyone. At the end of the day, this is why we do what we do for our family. So just again, thank you all very much.
Kash: Thank you guys. Appreciate it. Thank you.
Will Gray: All right. Y'all take care.
Kash: Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye.