On y'all. Welcome back to Blockspace Live, presented by CleanSpark for another beautiful day of earnings, Charlie, and we've got a lot to chew through, my man.
We have CoreWeave's Q2 earnings coming up first, and big updates with CoreWeave. ARR has been guided upwards to over 10 billion, Charlie, but that's on the back of a lot of debt.
There's a lot in the balance sheet to comb over, so we will be doing that first. Following that, we've got Nebius's Q2 earnings as well.
And then after Nebius, we have CoreWeave Chief Development Officer, Brandon McBee on to talk about some of the more salient aspects of the Q2.
We're gonna be talking about the fact that they just signed a, a contract for A10s through 2029. Where are the depreciation hawks? We'd love to have a word with you. A100s, you mean, right? Yeah. Did I say A100s? Yeah.
Whatever. I don't even know. Thank you. [laughs] A100s are still in the game, and they will be for some years.
We're gonna have some questions on that, as well as how they think about structuring deals going forward if contracts roll over, and also how they're managing all of this debt that they're accumulating.
After that, we have a note on White Fiber's Q2 as well, and then Charlie will cap off the segment with Wintermute moving towards AI trading. Everyone's pivoting. No one cares about crypto anymore.
But we could have told you that. We pivoted a few months ago. Yeah, we could have told you that.
Uh, Blockspace goes live every weekday at 1:00 PM Eastern, because we are Compute's daily live show covering quick hits on AI, infrastructure, data centers, emerging technology, and markets.
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More on CleanSpark later on the show.
And, um, we're just gonna have to get rid of, of all news stories e- uh, today, Colin, because it's just earnings, earnings, earnings, which means we have to play the earnings update intro. [beeping] That's right.
Coming in hot earnings week. Let me show you what the current week looks like. We're halfway through the second week of earnings here at Blockspace. Monday, we did watch parties for Keel, Bitdeer, Riot.
Tuesday, we had watch party for CoreWeave. Today, Wednesday, we have Brandon McBee, as Colin just said, co-founder of CoreWeave, as well as Chief Development Officer.
Had watch parties for Nebius and White Fiber this morning. Tomorrow, Thursday, we have CEO, uh, and captain of Keel Infrastructure, Ben Gagnon.
And Sam T- Tabar of White Fiber, CEO of White Fiber, was originally scheduled today, pushed to tomorrow. So apologies to those who were expecting him today. He'll be here tomorrow.
And then we'll be doing a watch party for Soluna. Speaking of Soluna, Soluna CFO, Mike Pitchie, uh, on the show Friday. Uh, Soluna's CEO also had to push earlier this week.
He will be joining us very soon, probably next week. So stay tuned. Outside of that, I'm gonna toss it back to Colin. Uh, so put on your thinking caps, 'cause Colin's about to dive deep into
the w- the weaving world of CoreWeave. Dive deep indeed. There's a lot to go through here, Charlie, so hopefully we don't get the bends as we dive into it. [laughs] Yeah.
And, and I'll, I'll occasionally pull up, uh, DI metrics as we go through this because there's some, like, reference points for, like, GPU hour rents and, like, where the stock is and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So... So CoreWeave coming out with their Q2 earnings with a big beat, Charlie. A big beat. So much so that the stock is up 20% over the last five days. I mean, look at that gap up.
This is, this reminds me of what happened with Microsoft and Amazon after their cloud segments just blew everyone's expectations out of the way.
So if you heard about death knells, the bell does not toll for this AI stock sector just yet. Things are still rip-roaring. CoreWeave above $100 at 107 as the time of recording.
The headline here on Blockspace reads, "CoreWeave Q2 Revenue Reaches 2.58 Billion as Backlog Grows to 104 Billion."
That was one of the highlights, the backlog of, of remaining, uh, remaining commitments for their neo-cloud line.
We'll be going over the numbers really quickly before we get into some qualitative assessments of what was revealed on the earnings call and also the Q&A session. So here are the headline numbers for CoreWeave from Q2.
Again, 2.5 sev- $2.575 billion in Q2 revenue. That's up 112% year over year. Cost of revenue ballooned to 879 million, up 181%. N- there's no free lunch.
Technology and infrastructure came in at 1.5 billion, up 125%. Operating loss was 49 million, uh, up from, or, or down from 19 million in Q2 2025. And here's the oth- here's the big one. A- and it's what...
You know, funnily enough, this didn't come up in the call.
I guess people can s- just assume they have it covered, but their interest expense ballooned to 640 million, up 140% from 267 million in the same period last year.
Net loss came in at 626 million, up 116%, and earnings per share was negative $1.14 per share, um, which is a- Up from negative, or down from negative $0.60 per share at the same period last year.
So why the loss despite the revenue surge? Interest expense is the real story here.
At six hundred and forty million against two point five eight billion in revenue, roughly twenty five cents of every dollar of revenue goes to servicing debt currently.
Operating loss was forty-nine million, net loss six hundred and twenty-six million. The gap is almost entirely financing cost.
Cash interest paid in H1 alone of twenty twenty-six was eight hundred and six million, and that almost understates the burden.
The company capitalized another a hundred and seventy-six million of interest into construction during the first half of twenty twenty-six.
So total interest incurred is meaningfully higher than what runs through the income statement. We'll be getting into some questions on that with Brandon once he comes online.
But TLDR, as we all know, as you know, Charlie, and listeners know, CapEx is ripping for the AI industry. It's very expensive to finance these GPUs for CoreWeave, and that growth comes at a clear cost.
That being said, there were some interesting deals, or rather there was an interesting financing deal that CoreWeave struck recently right before earnings hit that we will cover with regards to how they are financing short-term contracts.
It's not all bad. As long as the money keeps flowing, they've structured it in such a way that they will be able to address this.
The Q3 quarterly interest expense was guided to-- was written for a guidance of eight hundred and sixty to nine hundred and forty million. Again, big numbers here.
And, uh, one notable thing, despite the huge rise in revenue, stock-based comp was basically flat for the first half of twenty twenty-six at three hundred and eighteen million.
Now, let's dig into a little more of the balance sheet with regards to this debt and some of the other aspects of CoreWeave's business.
Total assets went from forty-nine point three billion to seventy-seven point one billion. Total liabilities scaled accordingly from forty-six billion to tw- seventy-two billion. Equity is currently five billion.
And this growth sits according to the following buckets: property and equipment net went from thirty point six billion to forty-six point seven billion.
Technology equipment alone in the GPU fleet rose from twenty point nine billion to three point three billion. Construction in progress sits at eleven point nine billion.
Recourse debt went from twenty point seven billion to thirty-one point four billion. Uh, the current-- That's current plus non-current.
Non-recourse debt also grew from six hundred and forty-seven million to three point six six billion. So most of the debt that CoreWeave has on its balance sheet right now is recourse to the parent company.
We've got a question for Brandon on that. Cash and cash equivalents sat at five point five two billion plus one point three eight billion restricted.
So total debt is roughly thirty-five billion against five billion in equity.
H1 financing raised-- In H1 twenty twenty-six, they raised sixteen point seven billion of debt gross, two point nine eight billion from private placements of stock against five point two billion of repayments.
There are also lease liabilities that add to the total liabilities here that are not structured specifically as debt recourse to the parent. Operating lease liabilities totaled sixteen point three billion.
That's current plus non-current. They are not counted in that debt figure, so combined with debt, those fixed obligations are approaching fifty-one billion. That's pretty hefty.
Regarding financing, one of the more interesting bits that came out recently before this earnings call and which was touched on in the analyst section, CoreWeave closed a new debt facility that is meant to finance short-term GPU take or pay contracts.
They closed an oversubscribed two point six billion delayed draw term loan facility known as DDTL five point five on August 10th, twenty twenty-six.
The financing features an approximately five-year maturity and is priced at SOFR plus five and a half percent, so roughly nine point ten percent there for the fi- for the interest rate.
And this fund, uh, the funding is for customer-dedicated GPU and high-performance AI cloud infrastructure.
This is specifically short-term financing that on the call CoreWeave billed as being instrumental to allowing them to offer shorter term contracts, roughly two to three years, versus the kind of five-year standard for their longer-term take or pay.
That's the kind of contract that they're signing with guys like Microsoft. And it's-- This is as far as I can understand, like one of the first financing deals of its kind, Charlie.
And what it ultimately points to is that now lenders are getting more comfortable lending at shorter-- on shorter terms for these contracts that are seen as less sticky and potentially less accretive to the business.
But it opens up the potential for CoreWeave to be much more flexible with how they manage their compute.
Also, I have a question with Brandon on that because right now, their guidance for current revenue and forward revenue, ninety-eight percent comes from take or pay contracts.
The majority of that is in the long-term bucket versus the short term. And analysts, uh, had a lot to say on the call as to or a lot to ask on the call regarding how CoreWeave views its fleet in terms of being flexible.
When those contracts roll over, will they put that into shorter term contracts? Will they put it into inference? Will they put it into spot on demand? And, uh, management basically said, "TLDR, we're looking into it.
The economics of what makes the most sense right now and also the landscape doesn't make it clear what is the best option." They're gonna keep their options open for whatever is maximizing value on those GPUs. Cash flow.
Operating cash flow swung from minus a hundred and ninety million a year ago to plus two three point six six billion.
That was driven by two point five four billion of depreciation and amortization add back and a one point three seven billion of deferred revenue growth.
CapEx was fourteen point one billion in the first six months of the year. There's also another nine point eight billion of capital expenditures incurred but not yet paid.
Sitting in liabilities, that includes OEM-financed additions.
Of the one point four seven billion was, that was reclassified into debt during H1 upon execution of OEM financing arrangements, those are equipment purchases that are converting into debt on the balance sheet after the fact.
Now, the number that everyone is interested in, deal flow. ARR management is now guiding ten point three billion as of this latest quarter, and it is about to ramp up.
As of June 30th, CoreWeave reported one hundred and three point seven billion of unsatisfied remaining performance obligations with a disclosed run-off schedule as such, forty-one percent recognized in the initial twenty-four months following June, so that's through June twenty-twenty eight, thirty-nine percent between twenty-five and forty-eight months, and the remainder between forty-nine and seventy-eight months.
That seventy-eight-month tail shows that contract duration has extended well beyond the two to three-year deals that characterized the early neo cloud market.
Roughly forty-two point five billion is expected to convert to revenue within two years against a current annualized run rate of around ten point three billion.
Deferred revenue is nine point seven billion, up from eight point two billion at year-end, and customers are prepaying at scale, as that indicates.
Speaking of those customers, customer concentration is easing, but it's still on the higher side or, according to some analysts.
Customer A, assumed to be Microsoft, CoreWeave's biggest customer, had seventy-one percent concentration this time last year. Now they have thirty-six. Customer B had, has twenty-six percent. Customer C, ten percent.
And Customer B and C both respectively had under ten percent in Q2 twenty-twenty five. That's still pretty heavy concentration between those three customers.
You're looking at seventy-two percent of the business being within three customers specifically. Last notes tr- here, Charlie, before I toss it to you for some color. We picked a few of the earnings call Q&A sections.
One of them was regarded to the ramp up on their sites, and their CFO, Nitin Agarwal, gave a pretty clear breakdown.
There's four point two gigawatts contracted as of today, plus one point five gigawatts of powered lands expansion options and executed LOIs.
So that's close to six gigawatts, and it's just the middle of twenty-twenty six, Agarwal highlighted. That's against an eight gigawatt target by twenty-thirty.
Maybe we get that eight gigawatt target bumped up since they're so close to six already.
And the fi- one point five gigawatt bucket is disclosed in aggregate only, no site-level breakdown, and that's similar to how we've seen other reporting in this sector.
The big question from a few analysts, and one we're gonna cover here in the interview: Can existing infrastructure serve inference, and how does CoreWeave see the edge versus hyperscaler landscape?
The answer from management addressed whether or not inference's heavier CPU and storage requirements force new generation data center designs.
Um, and Trader, uh, CEO and Trader's answer was philosophical rather than technical. CoreWeave doesn't build specific or separately for training versus inference.
It builds, quote, "AI infrastructure meant to serve the full loop." So CoreWeave basically leaving their options open or, uh, indicating that they are doing such as, uh, with regards to how they approach these builds.
Again, ninety-eight percent of their contracted deal flow is in that take or pay model.
I think one of the big questions going forward is at what point does it make sense or does it ever make sense to move towards a more spot or on-demand model or an inference model and token-based model for monetizing that compute?
So a couple takeaways. One, uh, they sold some, uh, GPUs higher than they bought them, right? Am I right about this? Um, I didn't see anything about that.
Actually, I might be mixing this up with a different earnings call.
Regardless, like, uh, I-- if I'm, if I'm reading the numbers right, like, uh, what CoreWeave's getting, uh, per GPU hour does-- Oh, no, it's the A one hundred. They signed that A one hundred deal for ten years.
Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the A one hundred deal pretty- And, and I mean, yeah, and, and what we're gonna see across the earnings today, uh, and really this week so far, is that, uh,
GPU depreciation, the death, uh, what is it? The death of GPU and early depreciation were vastly overstated. And this is what Jensen's point was last week or this week.
This is what, uh, we see here with the CoreWeave news. Um, so we're actually seeing in some cases used GPUs go higher. And, um, let me pull up DI metrics here.
Um, CoreWeave up twenty-one percent today. Wild. And, and this-- I mean, the three earnings today, Naevious, CoreWeave, and whi- White Fiber all up. Year to date,
Naevious up one seventy-four, White Fiber up sixty-six point nine, and CoreWeave up thirty-five point three.
You know, I go on Twitter, Colin, and whenever people like look at, you know, whenever I see analysts, the smart analysts I see, um, commenting on this, they almost all say CoreWeave is the king, CoreWeave is the best, so.
Um, and SemiAnalysis does rank them in the platinum tier, the top tier of their NeoCloud, uh, tier list. So, uh, this does, uh, reinforce that view, so. One hundred percent.
And one point of clarity before we move on to Naevius. For that A one hundred deal, their CFO, Agarwal, said that older generations, quote, "Remain higher or at levels that we've seen about a year ago."
Hedging the language there a little bit, but at the very least, management is saying that they are sticky and that the pricing hasn't moved. Which- And, and that tracks- Which is bullish one way or the other. Yeah.
What is... What are we seeing on, on- I mean, that, yeah, that tracks with what we're seeing, um, on DI metrics just for third-party marketplaces, and I think this is pulled from Oren. I mean, B200s a year ago, $4.50.
B200s today, $6. H100s and 200s, 2 and 3, and now 3 and 4. I mean,
um, yeah, we're seeing, uh, GPUs at, as they say, at or above, uh, where they were a year ago. And these are the, these are the, the, the settled prices on markets.
These are not necessarily the actual locked in, like, delivery prices of GPUs. So, um, A100's holding in there [chuckles] really well. I mean, look at this. Just look at, like, the, the last six months.
Um, A100's still actually up on the past couple months from, I think, 80 some odd cents per GPU hour to now a dollar. This is a six-year-old card. If we're looking, [chuckles] you know, another
five plus years on this card, uh, very significant. All your GPU, all your GPU projections are wrong. So, um, I think we'll, uh, let you touch on Nevius' earnings, and then after that we'll have, uh- Act- Yeah.
Actually, turns out Brandon's actually in the wings right now. Rather than just cram Nevius in- Yeah. [chuckles]... and this is actually a good, uh, jump-off point, 'cause- Yeah... my first question is on A100. Yeah.
So I think we'll go ahead and rip the CleanSpark ad, and then- Yeah... have Brandon on. Yeah. We'll have Brandon on right after a word from our sponsor, CleanSpark. [gentle music] We are CleanSpark,
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All righty, we have CoreWeave CDO, Brandon McBee, in the wings, bringing him up to grill him on the Q2 earnings. Brandon, welcome to the show, and thank you for joining, man. Really appreciate it. Hey, guys.
Thanks for the time today. Appreciate it. Yeah, definitely. Lot to chew through. Huge quarter. Congrats on that. Big beats across the board, and stock price is being, uh, is, is pumping as a result.
We were just talking about A100s. I'd love to start off there, specifically with this A100 contract running through 2029. I kinda have two questions here.
Can you give us any information on the detail for these contracts, whether they're priced statically from what y'all were seeing a year ago, at a discount or a premium?
And also, a follow-up on Jensen Huang arguing that the A100 useful life may run closer to a decade.
Does this contract support that claim, and does CoreWeave now depreciate GPU classes on a longer schedule than it did a year ago?
So kind of a two-part question there of, like, what exactly does this deal look like in terms of the specifics, or can you give us a flavor for that, and how do you treat depreciation accordingly? Yeah, thanks.
So, uh, pricing on the infrastructure, A100 specifically, has really held very well in market over the last 12 to 18 months. Right? We really haven't seen much degradation in pricing at all.
I believe even our last queue, we were commenting how A100 pricing had actually increased a bit, uh, over the, the, the prior 12 months. So we're still in 2025 or even, like, late 2024 pricing for that SKU.
Um, given that it's a 2020 release, and I think you guys are focused on the exact right point of you're contracting out through 2029 now. I mean, it's just a massive narrative violation.
Um, I, you know, we've been hammered with questions around depreciable, uh, term and useful life, et cetera. And we've just been consistent that these GPUs are going to have a longer useful life than the market expects.
And super important to clarify that people aren't choosing an A100 because they can't get access to an H100 or a B200, right?
They're coming in specifically asking for that Ampere or that Hopper or that Blackwell because they're pairing their engineering requirement, their workload, with the piece of infrastructure that's most optimized for it.
And guess what? There's tons of workloads that need A100s. There's tons of workloads that need H200s. So I think Jensen's comment that Ampere could be a, a decade-long SKU is, is entirely correct, right?
I mean, we're only a year off from that right now. And even more supportive to your point on what does the contract look like, these are firm economic take or pay agreements, right?
Like, arguably it's the lowest margin profile type of contract that we sign in the sense of it's not an on-demand contract, it's a term fully committed take or pay agreement.
And to have that out all the way through 2029, uh, just speaks about the amount of not only the demand in the space, but the durability of all different types of SKUs that support that demand.
You know, we, we come from, uh, the Bitcoin mining side of things, and one of my favorite, uh, kind of contrasting variables with regards to AI compute versus Bitcoin mining is there's, there's, there's only one form of Bitcoin mining [chuckles] compute.
You're doing SHA-256, and there's- Yeah... no flexibility with regards to an older generation model and a new generation model.
You're worried about the efficiency, and if the revenue doesn't make sense, you have to shut off those older models. And so what I hear from you is that at this point it's not even about-
It's not even about operators looking for the newer infrastructure, and then they can't get it, so they're settling for the older models.
It's that there are legitimate questions as to what is the right fit for workload and the economics of that actual GPU itself. And- I think that's exactly correct.
Well, and that kind of leads into my next question, 'cause one of the questions on...
A, a few analysts had on the earnings call was re- with, with regards to contract, um, uh, designation and with flexibility for the compute.
S- y'all's CFO said committed revenue, roughly 98% of the total was durable, but your CEO, um, said that there...
Y'all are still kind of thinking through whether or not to, like, roll over old contracts into maybe a spot or on-demand inference compute, whether or not maybe shorter term makes sense.
Uh, the new, uh, f- facility that y'all signed on August 10th is, is, is, um, relevant here with regards to those short-term contracts.
So I'm curious from where you're standing, what are, like, the two or three variables that actually decide this cluster will be used for this type of contract versus another type of contract?
Is it remaining useful life, uh, customer credit, inference demand in that region?
And how does the DDTL 5.5 financing change the default, or just add a financing option for whichever workloads already looked like enterprise deals? Yeah.
And, and I think you're circling around the main point that contributes to what sort of, um, revenue class we allocate into, which is financing, right? So for newer SKUs,
w- we're leaning pretty heavily into looking for financing, um, on those, that CapEx as we bring it online, right?
The best way to finance that CapEx is to have long-term take-or-pay contracts that we drop into these DDTL style facilities. Traditionally, you know, we, we've always done between two and six-year contracts.
It's just the volume weighted average contract duration. It's been, you know, around four and a half to five years.
Um, and that's been the kind of bedrock or foundation of how we've established this financing flywheel of our business. But recently, with, uh, facilities like DDTL 5.5, we've made steps towards how do we
finance shorter duration contracts, without just, like, kind of pairing them up with longer duration contracts instead, 'cause that's what we've done before.
But how do you finance just a basket of two to three-year contracts? And 5.5 was our first facility as a term, term loan B offering, where the duration of the contracts was actually shorter than the amort period.
Uh, to put that in simpler terms, we are asking our investors in that facility to underwrite us renewing contracts or remarketing that infrastructure, right?
They're taking on the risk that we will need to go out there and, um, find incremental consumers of those GPUs to handle the full amortization, and that's a deviation from, um, what we've done in the past, and I would say an, an enhancement in our ability to go finance a broader set of different types of contracts.
Um, great positive for us because we are very eager to expand our support of the enterprise space, and we announced, uh, Caterpillar as a client in this quarterly earnings. I don't...
I, I would imagine not many people had that on their bingo card for us to onboard Caterpillar as a client. We're incredibly excited to support them.
But that's a great example of, um, the types of clients that are more focused on two to three-year agreements, and us establishing our own ability to go out and finance, uh, those contracts discreetly is, uh, incredibly important to us.
So that, that was the main feature of 5.5.
So on that note with moving into some of these enterprise contracts that might have been out of left field for some people, I wanna kind of talk about customer concentration for a second because, uh, cust- your primary customer, customer A, which I believe is Microsoft, but we'll plead the fifth on that one if we need to, went down from 71 to 36%, uh, of revenue for the year.
Fantastic, but the top three customers are still roughly 72% combined. Would you talk about these other enterprise customers?
Um, that trend away from diversificating, uh, diversification away from, like, one hyperscaler into two or three, um, i- i- is that, uh, just what happens while, uh, you see this extended backlog?
And does an investment-grade counterparty like Microsoft get priced differently in your credit facilities in a well-funded but non-rated lab or an enterprise customer? Yeah. Uh, yeah.
And, and, and another way to kind of ask that, i-i-is will there be more focus on those shorter term enterprise customers as evidenced by this financing that y'all just struck, or is this really just opportunistic, whatever comes your way?
Y- you will see us allocating our portfolio very thoughtfully across different types of clients in order to drive that customer diversification. Um, we want enterprise. We want hyperscale cloud.
We want hyperscale clients like Meta. Uh, we want AI labs. I, I think all of these channels are incredibly important to us.
Um, but it's up to us to be able to allocate, uh, effectively across those channels, uh, uh, to, to keep growing them all accordingly.
Um, cost of capital spread, uh, I, I think you've seen us finance investment grade at, like, call it plus 250. You've seen us finance non-investment grade at plus, call it, around 500-ish.
So 250 bip spread of financing between those things. I...
Overall, I think that that is a phenomenal advancement in our, um, cost of capital basis for financing both investment grade and non-investment grade counterparties.
Um, and we're able to do so in a, um- Uh, very efficient manner.
When I say that, like our transactions are now measured in kind of days to weeks to, to run these processes, as opposed to when we were a private co, it would take months to go and, uh, uh, do these financings.
Um, so I'm, I'm very proud of our financing organization, and I consider it a, a, a critical asset and muscle that we built within our business.
On, on the note of financing, I think, you know, to speak plainly, one of the things that made some investors and analysts, um, queasy following the call, although you didn't get any questions about this on the call, is specifically the debt load.
Um, I think it's like 31 billion current, non-current, uh, as of the end of Q- Q2. Um, obviously, uh, you don't get a free lunch. You don't get all of this growth without having something to finance it.
But one of the things that was notable is that non-recourse debt was gr- grew pretty heavily over the quarter. So I just have a question about that.
Um, is the strategic goal to shift the mix towards more non-recourse project financing over time?
Is that even possible, um, since, you know, CoreWeave is specifically running the GPUs and not having powered shells or building the infrastructure itself? Um, or is recourse debt still the default going forward? Sure.
And how do you think about balancing the two? So w- with our most recent investment grade DDTL offering, that was the first time we introduced an offering as a non-recourse facility, right?
There's no parent guarantee on it. Um, we were able to successfully kind of remove that, that covenant or that bar- that burden on the parent.
I think going forward, that'll become status quo for investment grade SPVs or DDTLs that we're doing, where it's no longer necessary, uh, to have CoreWeave parent providing additional credit into that facility.
I would expect that it'll remain on the non-investment grade DDTLs in the near term, but we'll be seeking to remove that in the future. At the end of the day, uh,
we will seek to not have CoreWeave parent credit as a credit enhancer on these SPVs. Um, general debt load overall, like, th- this has been a confusing one to me.
I'm, I'm gonna take two perspectives on it. One, when we're financing in a DDTL structure, we're typically, and outside of this DDTL 5.5, um, that was a, a smaller facility overall.
Um, but typically the entire amortization of the facility takes place within the bounds of the contracts that we're signing, right? But it goes beyond amortization.
It is inclusive of facility operations as well. So think about it logically. Revenue flows into an SPV based on the full amortization, which includes interest and principal. That gets paid down.
The operation of the GPUs gets paid down. That's all the data center costs. And then you have a, I think we've disclosed roughly a 25% contribution margin that kicks up to the parent co afterwards.
That contribution margin is just profit that goes to parent. So that debt is fully amortizes within the SPVs. It's being done at a decreasing cost of capital.
Uh, we, we look at that as a benefit, right? Not, not a burden, 'cause, you know, the, the only other way to finance this stuff would be like massive equity issuances, right? And that's, you know, pretty, um,
challenging for equity holders. Um, we didn't have the benefit of huge free cash flow to finance, uh, everything that we're doing, like our peer set, the, the hyperscalers.
Um, but you can see like even they are dipping into debt now because at the end of the day, we are solving the massive demand of AI and the demands of our clients to deliver on an accelerated timeline and, uh, accessing credit markets responsibly to accelerate that timeline.
I, I think that's our job, to go, to go solve that. The, the other variable that I think is not as appreciated on the debt side is just the incremental level of diligence that the equity investor gets, right?
Like f- a- as an equity investor, you don't get access to our data center agreements. You don't get access to our, um, compute offtake agreements that we're signing.
But within these credit facilities, these guys get everything, right? They go through it in intense detail to ensure that the data center contract is, um, bulletproof.
They make sure that the offtake agreement for the GPUs is bulletproof.
You're getting this extra level of underwriting on just the core of our business, the economics of our business from the credit market that I think is a huge value add for the equity investor.
I, I just don't feel like that that is appreciated, um, enough in the market. Yeah, I mean, I think that's when you see some people flag the debt loads of all...
and it's not just CoreWeave, it's literally every single company in the CapEx cycle. Yeah.
Um, people often ignore the actual contracts that go behind that, and I think that's also ties back into the, like, what, what tenant would you rather have?
You know, I would imagine that if you're having that recourse, uh, that recourse debt to the parent company, having those hyperscaler contracts make lenders and should make investors a little more comfortable with regards to the in- the, uh, to, to the credit profile of those offtakers of the compute.
So appreciate the a- answers there. I've just got a couple more for you, Brandon, and then we'll get you out of here.
Um- One of the things that w- came up in this Q2 was this New Jersey, uh, joint venture, uh, where y'all's stake went from 15 to 35% over in a year. I'm curious, at what point,
uh, does that ownership level stop being kind of like w- um, unconsolidated, uh, VIE on paper and start being kind of a subsidiary of substance for you guys? And or does it- Oh, boy.
[laughs] Um, that, that's something I would need our CFO here to be able to comment on, and I don't think that we're providing too much color there. Okay.
I, I'm, and I'm just curious, so maybe a, um, a, a higher level question with that. You know, the JVs seem to be ramping up recently. I'm just curious about the, uh, the strategic calculus there. I- is this a,
is this a capital allocation, uh, consideration? Is this just, uh, the deals make sense so you're signing them? Just curious as to why we're seeing them move into the picture now- Yeah... more than we have in the past.
Yeah. I, I think it has to do with our data center strategy overall.
Like, historically, we've been very focused on leasing data centers, as it was a efficient way to quickly access the market at scale and to leverage the market's expertise of delivering data centers.
Um, you know, a- as we have gone through, I believe, 51 data centers in active operation today, which is just an insane number to, to have globally, we've developed a extremely robust skill set of, um, uh, developing and delivering data centers and working with our partners.
So I, I think it's entirely logical for us to be doing self-build, and you'll see more self-build on the data center side coming out of us.
But when we do that, um, I, I, I think it's less appropriate for us to do the full financing of that self-build, right?
It makes sense for us to go out to partners to be a part of a JV for development, and to have other parties involved within it.
And so I, I view doing JV partnerships on the build of CoreWeave-owned facilities, um, a pretty logical path for us to be going down, that w- we will expand as it makes economic sense to us.
Yeah, that makes sense to me, kind of easing into a kind of more vertically integrated structure with some- Yeah... of these.
You know, uh, one of the questions that often gets asked, and this isn't a question directly to you, but I think most people who don't swim in these waters, they, they, they can't really wrap their head around why you have all of these different parts of the value chain kind of split between these different companies.
Like, "Well, oh, this company only runs the GPUs, and this company only runs the infrastructure." And most people don't realize that, uh, you're playing to these different companies' strengths.
You're also dividing the capital expenditure burden, um, accordingly in a way that makes it more manageable for everyone involved. Uh, all right. I, I just have, um, I think one more question here, uh, for you.
And let me see if I can get it here on my prep sheet. Uh, oh, this, this one is a margin question, and maybe this is o- again, one for the CFO.
But the 5 to 10 point margin step up for the Q2 signings is pretty significant. Yep. And I'm curious, where is that coming from? Is this coming from better deals because compute demand is so voracious?
Is this coming from CoreWeave software stack? Is it coming from advancements in GPU efficiency, or is it all of the above? Like, how are you squeezing out that extra margin on these- Yeah... new deals?
'Cause it really runs afoul of the, um, some of the commentary of w- w- we should see ultimately...
Or, or rather, you know, I think a long enough timeframe we'll see this, but people, I think, are expecting compute to commoditize much more quickly than we're actually seeing out in the field.
I think it's a mixture of everything that you highlighted, but the ultimate driver here, it's just TAM, right? It, it's demand. And demand for this compute is just continuing to inflect higher.
I feel like I say it every quarter. I'm, like, kind of running out of verbs [laughs] to describe what's, what's happening. Um, but w- what is underpinning that demand is ROI for our clients, right?
Which I appreciate was, you know, a large market question for quite some time, which is like, look at all this investment in AI. Where's the ROI on it?
And I, I think that the m- numbers that are starting to get out there are, like, incredibly supportive of, um, there being massive ROI on AI, uh, for CoreWeave clients and, you know, uh, uh, uh, AI entities across the space.
And so that ROI finds its way back into pricing. Um, I think it all stems from inference, or a- as we like to call it, inference is really the monetization of AI, right? Um,
i- that is truly, like, early innings, and it is accelerating in ways that are almost undescribable.
So that 5 to 10 percentage point contribution margin increase, um, we, uh, we're very happy to report that for Q2 contracts.
Um, we also reported a 25 percentage point just pricing increase in our rate cards across all SKUs, right? That's not a mixture. It's not selecting certain SKUs are getting a 25, uh, percent increase in price.
It's across our entire rate card. Um, and it just all comes back to the fact that demand for AI is stronger than it ever has been, and, uh, uh, those consumers of AI, of AI are driving massive returns off of it.
I'll probably wrap up going back to where we started, which is on just GPU depreciation, going back to the A100s.
Which if I'm looking at it right, um, you guys, your, your A100s from earlier this decade fully depreciate in, or like around 2027.
But the contract you signed runs through '29 or maybe later, so- Like, what does this, uh, mean for, like, revenue-generating assets with zero book value?
And then do you think this applies to new g- new generations of rigs? And, like, what's the... Like, zoom out really quick and talk about GPU depreciation in general again. Yeah. We use six-year depreciation.
I think our peer set is five and a half to six years or so. Um, I, I don't think you're gonna see us changing that anytime soon. But useful life is absolutely skewing beyond six years.
I mean, we're, we're seeing in reality, and I, I think we've been quite vocal about this ever since we IPO'd, that useful life, um, absolutely can extend beyond its six-year, uh, depreciable life that everyone uses today.
The way we look at it, and we're former commodity traders, right? We spent, uh, decades in risk management before starting CoreWeave. But, you know, it- it's just
such attractive optionality that we're building by owning these GPU bases, right?
Because i- if these assets truly are monetizable post their depreciable life, which it certainly looks like they are, it is fantastic margin profiles, right?
To, to your point, you, you, you drop depreciation off these things, which, you know, is the largest part of the COGS on GPUs. Um, they're incredibly attractive to the asset holder at this point.
So I, I think that we're building, um, an, an immensely valuable option set of cloud-connected revenue-generating infrastructure where demand, frankly, is just unsolvable in the near term, um, and e- even the medium term.
Uh, we, we don't see a path to satiating the market's need for compute to serve AI workloads. Brannon, thank you so much for joining.
And I just have to say, from ETH miner to 51 data centers under your belt, uh, just been truly one of the more impressive transformations within the tech sector. So again, hats off to y'all.
Looking forward to what y'all have cooking for the rest of the year.
Really appreciate you coming on, and, uh, would love to, would love to, um, round-trip this, uh, during Q through or end of year, uh, financials next year. So thanks for the time, man. That'd be great. Thanks, guys.
Appreciate it. Thank you, Brannon. I ju- I just want to note something. A ama- like, Bitcoin miners just seething in some ways. Yeah. Like, imagine you buy the old...
You buy these GPUs as an older model, and you're gonna depreciate it on the balance sheet, but you're still going to get to juice it for a few more years after that. Bitcoin miners could never dream of this.
That being said, Charlie, I did just think then, you know, in, in a funny way, the AI pivot actually might help Bitcoin miners with depreciation. With the fact that hash price is, is kind of in a, you know, a...
Is in the dog days right now, but hash rate is actually in a bear market.
So you have a funny scen- uh, a funny situation within which, you know, like, S21s and maybe even S23s, that those generations might be able to stay online longer just because there's so much less competition, so.
Look, we've seen that, we've seen that happen in Bitcoin for a long time.
I will say, yeah, there's a lot of ETH miners who turned off thinking that that was it, um, when in fact, they probably should have tr- quadrupled down after the merge. Um, maybe myself included.
Anyway, uh, we're gonna keep on rolling. Uh, we are now going to hand it back to Colin to do Nebius. Uh, but before we review Nebius, I will read, uh, an ad from our sponsor, Luxur.
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Comes with a 60-day free trial. Get started at luxur.tech/commander. Colin, back to Nebius. Th- th- this is the, this is the freaking CoreWeave show, man. We're 52 minutes in [laughs] as of- I know.
I mean- I mean- Not... It's a Neo- It's like NeoCloud, uh, madness today. Yeah, it is NeoCloud madness. And honestly, all, all the same, I think. We're spending so much time on CoreWeave. I mean, y- you really...
Probably the most, um... You know, all said and done, one of the most exciting IPOs in recent memory. And so I, I imagine most people kind of want more here rather than less. But we will go ahead and
focus on CoreWeave, uh, ch- their chief rival, we might say, Nebius. I mean, it is kind of a little red versus blue here, although Nebius' color scheme is green.
I mean, in, in, you know, in, in, uh, Brannon's words, like, they don't see a path to servicing all the demand. Like,
at the, at a time when, like, demand is infinite, [laughs] uh, your rival is really, where can you get the power and plug in? Right. So maybe that's where the com- competition lies.
And that's kind of one question that I'd... I kind of wish we asked Brannon with regards- Yeah... to the data center moratoria all across the US, and some of the local pushback. They were asked that on the call.
Gotta get, gotta get it back on then, so. Right. They were asked about it on the call, and I don't really know what else you say other than, "Well, you know, we'll just go to places that don't have those."
But then everyone else is thinking that. Anyway, a, a decent number of headwinds, but if you can execute, I would imagine you are, uh, privileged over those obviously who haven't done as much, so.
All right, let's go ahead and hop on over to Nevius. I will get the Blockspace coverage up here. Nevius Q2 revenue jumps four hundred and fifty-four percent as AI capacity pricing and margins rise.
Again, that's coming at you all from Blockspace. You can go read the recap there, and we will start with the numbers here on the live stream. So revenue at five hundred and eighty-two point three million.
Again, that is up four hundred and fifty-four percent from Q2 2025. Cost of revenue also up accordingly, a hundred and thirty-three point six million.
My prep sheet just threw me for a loop here. Give me one second here y'all. Apologies. Here we go. One hundred and thirty-three point six million operate-- Uh, cost of revenue versus thirty point one million in Q2 2025.
That's up three hundred and forty-four percent. SG&A up a hundred and fifty-five percent to a hundred and seventy-three point nine million.
Depreciation and amortization also up to two hundred and fifty-nine point seven million. That's up two hundred and forty-five percent year over year.
Loss from operations came in at neg-- Uh, came in at a hundred and seventy-five point nine million, up from a hundred and eleven point two million in the same period last year.
Interest expense up two thousand three hundred and eighty-one percent. It was only four point eight million in Q2 2025. Now it's a hundred and nineteen point one million.
Net loss came in at a hundred and ninety point four million, which is way down from a net gain of five hundred and two point five million in the same period last year.
Adjusted EBITDA coming in at two hundred and thirty-six point two million, which is a sight better than the twenty-one million dollar negative EBITDA they posted at the same time last year. Now,
regarding the net loss, this is a comp artifact. This is not deterioration of the company. Q2 2025's almost, or roughly half billion net income was almost entirely from a non-cash gain from revaluing equity securities.
Strip that one off, uh, off, off of both periods, and the underlying business went from a heavy loss-making operation to adjusted EBITDA of two hundred and thirty-six point two million. Um,
so just getting that out, out front.
H1 income was-- An H1 net income was still positive at four hundred and thirty point eight million because H1 2026 also carried a seven hundred and eighty point six million equity reevaluation gain.
So unlike Q2, the Q2 standalone, the six-month GAAP figure is flattered by the same mechanism working in Nevius's favor over the first full half.
So little, you know, change in fair value kinda doing a lot of lifting there. Real story here, adjusted EBITDA has inflected, and the margins are expanding fast.
Adjusted EBITDA margin roughly forty-one percent in Q2, up from a negative twenty percent margin a year ago. Cost of revenues also fell from twenty-nine percent to twenty-three percent of revenue.
SG&A fell from sixty-five percent to thirty percent of revenue. And depreciation and amortization in absolute dollars was up two hundred and forty-five percent.
But that-- But it fell as a share of revenue from seventy-two to forty-five percent. So when you account for the revenue coming in the door, those ratios all decreased over the course of Q2.
Um, cleanest evidence is the scale you're working. Uh, you know, revenue is up and those ratios down as a result. Total assets over the quarter went from twelve point four, um-- Or this is over the last six months.
Twel-total assets, twelve point four billion to twenty-eight billion. Property and equipment alone from five point five billion up to thirteen billion. Cash stands at eight billion, up from three point six eight billion.
That's despite eight point one three billion of CapEx in H1. CapEx in Q2 alone was five point six six billion, 10X increase from the same period last year, which is, uh, pr-pretty phenomenal.
Total debt went from four point one three billion to eight point five five billion. Operating cash flows plus two point two five billion in Q2.
It's up from negative operating cash flows of one hundred and sixty-seven point nine million a year ago. And financing activities unsurprisingly ramped up in Q2, up two point eight six billion. So
gonna go into operations here real quick, Charlie, and then I will shut up, toss it to you for some color.
Nevius forward guidance annualized run rate revenue reached roughly three billion at quarter end, which is up fifty-six percent from Q1's one point nine two billion.
Still tracking toward a seven to nine billion dollar ARR year-end target for 2026. Um, though the quarter's pace doesn't close that gap, they're going to need some acceleration in the second half of the year.
Full year 2026 revenue guidance was reaffirmed at three to three point four billion, and adjusted EBITDA margin guidance held at forty percent. Contracted power target has been raised to five gigawatts by year-end.
That is a bump up from prior guidance. While connected power guidance held at eight hundred to one-- Eight hundred megawatts to one gigawatt. Pretty big gap if you're taking that into account.
Again, it seems like Nevius is saying that they thought-- If people thought that the first half of the year was bullish for them, then they're going to have to say, "Hold my beer for the second half," because they're going to need some serious ramp-up in capacity to meet some of these numbers.
Interesting thing here, Charlie, with regards to how they're approaching financing for a lot of this ramp-up Our boy Rittenhouse Research has been extremely critical of Nbius because they're like, I think their 2030 or
their multi-year gigawatt target is pretty insane considering how much they have outstanding with regards to financing. So far, customer prepayments have been doing most of the work.
Customer prepayments reportedly covered 50 to 70% of associated CapEx, um, depending on the source. Their CEO said 50 to 60% on the call.
The earnings summary separately says $9 billion of prepayments were expected in 2026, and 70% of Q2 contracts included upfront financing. So they are taking the upfront financing.
They'll take a haircut on the initial terms of those compute deals as a result of that upfront ca- uh, upfront prepayments. But this also helps them moderate their debt load a little bit.
So, you know, it's kind of deciding what, uh, you know, what trade-offs you wanna take there. Uh, another really interesting bit from the quarter.
Capac-uh, capacity auction and short duration deals were introduced in Q2.
These agreements are up to six months and priced at $40 to $50 million per megawatt, which is a premi- a big premium from the 20 to $25 million per megawatt long-term rate, so roughly two X what those long-term rates are.
And management explicitly framed these as price discovery rather than a shift in strategy. Take or pay terms apply even to these shorter term deals. Interesting note there for management.
It's like they're trying to like feel or grope around in the dark for like what is the proper price point for this compute, but they're not, they're not saying that they're moving towards these g- uh, shorter term deals or these auction capacity deals, but mo- mostly just trying to use it to feel out what the market's saying.
All right, Charlie, I've got some management commentary lined up, but I'll pass it to you for any color or second takes that you have with regards to what we've combed through so far.
Um, I don't have a whole lot of insight 'cause [chuckles] there's so many earnings that it's difficult for me to dive into one. The on- maybe the only take I have is that, um,
the, their capacity auction, uh, doing some numbers with Claude looks like that, uh, the short-term duration deals, which are like under six months,
are clearing at 40 to 50 million per megawatt versus the 20 to 25 million per megawatt long-term deals. So spot is like, like two X the forward,
um, rate, and so that's pretty steep. That's pretty, that's pretty significant backwardation. So, uh, that means people are just paying a ton for GPUs today, and it's not that the GPUs aren't worth as much in the future.
It's just that they're worth so much if you can turn them on immediately. I mean, look at the Bitdeer, um, deal from w- uh, with, uh, presumably Anthropic in Norway from last week. Volta. Anthropic- Volta.
It's via, through Volta, yeah. Yeah, okay. With Anthropic via Volta, I mean, they're paying through the nose for this. It was like $5 million per megawatt. I for... Anyway, the numbers were, were, were crazy.
So, um, you know, I don't see how anyone doesn't not need compute today. I mean, if the deals are going like, clearing like that for today, ima- you know, in, in six months, I don't see that...
Like, we already know, like, there's an upper limit to how much, how many megawatts can come online, um, in the next six months. So like, and demand will probably only increase or stay steady.
And so, like, to me, these future, these six-month rates are just gonna be in the same situation we're in today in six months, so.
And I also wonder, you know, as CoreWeave, as Brandon McBee was talking about on our call, you know, they signed Caterpillar as an enterprise client. So it's like even companies that you don't think need compute
are renting out compute. I thought Caterpillar provided the power. No. [chuckles] They're also the customer. [chuckles] Yeah.
When he said that I was, when he said that, I was like: Wait, did I, did I miss something wrong? Aren't you Caterpillar's customer? No. [chuckles] It's nothing to do with- Yeah. Was, was I tripping with that? Yeah. Yeah.
But it does make me wonder. Like, the fact of the matter is, if you are a large enough company and you have the cash for it, and you are due diligent- due diligencing how you can use AI to augment your workflows,
that speaks to the demand picture right there. Because it's companies that you're not even thinking about looking for compute.
And how many of those companies are going to be signing long-term contracts like the hyperscalers? I would imagine not too many of them unless they're really certain about what they want and need.
A lot of them are probably in the R&D phase for what exactly is going to make sense for duration, for compute type, et cetera, for size.
And so I wonder if over the next quarter we will see more of these shorter term deals becoming a larger segment of revenue for these neo clouds at larger, at higher margins, and I wonder how much that changes the equation
for g- for people like CoreWeave, and this goes back to the analyst questions for their CEO. It's like, what, w- when these longer term contracts expire, what are you gonna do with those GPUs?
Do you expect to roll them back into the same hyperscaler clients, or is there a world in which you are confident enough in short-term demand that you are going to roll them into a bunch of smaller contracts across multiple different off-takers
in a way in which you can juice more margin for that compute? Yeah, you could probably- All of that just-... build a, build a cash flow, um, like powerhouse and use that to finance even more. So. Right.
And that, and I mean, a good, a good point with regards to free cash flows. Maybe potentially they'll get to a place where they're having to lean less on debt. I would imagine that we're quite some time out from that.
But to me, it's just a, I obviously don't have answers to this, but what it, what it surfaces for me are some pretty-
Reasonable questions with regards to how much is the demand landscape shifting in the sense of not just, okay, obviously there's a lot of demand, but in what form does that demand take, and what does that mean for who captures the most out of the value chain here in the AI stack?
Okay, I'll, I'll s- wrap up here pretty quickly, Charlie, just 'cause the, uh, honestly, the Q&A segment, uh, for Nebius was not that exciting. They had prescribed questions,
pre-screened questions, excuse me, and those were allocated to specific executives. They didn't have a live analyst Q&A, and that kinda tells you something about management, I think.
I mean, the fact of the matter is that's less dynamic. It gives management the, uh, benefit of being able to prepare the questions in advance.
The most egregious example of this within Bitcoin miners, uh, w- was, was Mara.
I mean, Mara, for a few quarterly earnings there for a while, literally just had, like, I think, like, one equity analyst on, and they would just ask questions that were pre-screened by Mara beforehand.
Kind of a tangent, but that being said, the Q&A session was not as useful as some of the other ones. One of the more useful questions, though, came from Ryan Lance of Morgan Stanley.
He was asking specifically about this Vineland, New Jersey site that has been in the news for two reasons, uh, that has been in the news recently.
Number one, there is a kind of regula- regulatory snag that Nebius has hit. Number two, as a way to circumvent that or address it, Nebius is leaning on Bloom Energy.
In fact, they mentioned Bloom Energy multiple times throughout the call, and Bloom Energy's stock ripped as a result. It was kind of seen as a validation of their entire fuel cell thesis.
So the most consequential exchange of this call came about this question. It directly updates a risk flagged with that Vineland site.
Lance asked what an adjourned without a vote hearing means for the ramp with regards to the regulatory tape that they are running into for this site. What management reframed it as procedural.
The hearing concerns approval of an amended site layout plan. It was triggered by Nebius' switch to Bloom Energy fuel cells as the power source. So they said this is not a new issue.
It's just a sign-off on a change already disclosed.
Management called it, quote, "Part of the normal process," end quote, already built into the schedule, and said Nebius is, quote, "Confident that the layout complies with the applicable local, state, and federal laws."
Um, they followed up by saying all contractually required tranches have been delivered on schedule to date.
Construction of the building itself finished earlier this summer, and Bloom fuel cell deployment, quote, "Should be fast," end quote. Both, uh, management explicitly denied any expected timeline impact.
Now, it seems to me like they framed it as a this isn't anything to worry about, but as I understand it, there are still regulatory hurdles to clear before that site can start generating revenue.
So I think that was one of the bigger concerns on the call. [lip smack] Um, another question that was worth flagging is the capacity ramp-up, um, for the gi- for the gigawatts they wanna have come online. Um, [lip smack]
management said almost all of the newly raised five gigawatt contracted power capacity comes online over the, quote, "Next two, three, maybe three point five years," end quote.
Pretty big window, um, hedging their bets there with regards to being, you know, pigeonholed into having, to giving a tighter timeline on that.
Management also disclosed that Nebius already has access secured to, quote, "Hundreds of megawatts," end quote, of behind-the-meter generation today.
This reiterates the strategic partnership with Bloom as an accelerant for their site, even if they can't get immediate on-site generation or on, excuse me, on-site, uh, power draw. Last point with regards to financing,
um, one analyst at Wolfe Research asked, "Given debt market volati- volatility and rising all-in costs, is Nebius still comfortable leaning on debt, or should investors expect more equity and convertible issuance?"
The CFO answered that they are prioritizing, uh, financing as following. Number one, customer prepayments and operating cash flow. Number two, asset-backed debt against forty billion dollars in contracted backlog.
Number three, corporate-level debt, currently, quote, "Almost none," end quote, is outstanding. And four, equity and equity-linked instruments at the market offering potential convertibles, et cetera.
So interesting, they're basically saying the number one financing plum- the n- the number one f- uh, source of financing we will plumb going forward are those customer prepayments and operating cash flows.
Little m- uh, d- divergence from what we've seen from CoreWeave, where they are specifically going after financing some of wha- most of which is recourse to the parent based on the contracts that they have signed.
Uh, you're muted there. And Nebius up thirty-four percent today. Uh, pretty nuts if you think about it. CoreWeave up twenty-two percent. W- White Fiber up twenty percent,
uh, as pictured here on DI Metrics, dimetrics.ai. Go check out that site. Colin, I think we round this out with some White Fiber that I'll take and lead after a word from our sponsor, Ligos.
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WhiteFiber, which by the way, we have WhiteFiber CEO Sam Tabar on the show tomorrow. Originally scheduled today, pushed to tomorrow, so put that on your calendars.
WhiteFiber, as reported in Blockspace this morning, WhiteFiber raises, uh, revenue rises 54% as NC1 in North Carolina starts billing contracted capacity. Um, they beat revenue expectations this morning, and why is that?
It's because a customer paid them to leave. So WhiteFiber printed a Q2 revenue of 28.8 million, uh, up 54, 55% with a $15 million net loss. The stock is up big.
Now up, I believe, as I said, 20.4%.
So of that revenue, which is up, uh, it's up because 12.3 of that revenue, 12.3 million of that revenue, is a one-time termination fee from their original anchor customer walking away.
Outside of that customer cloud revenue for the company was roughly 11.5 million, which is down 30% year-on-year.
So, uh, they tech-- If you drop the, the termination fee, they technically missed earnings, which were, uh, 19.7 million estimated. And, um, sans termination fee, uh, was 11.5 million. However,
forward looking for the company is quite bullish.
So NC1 in Madison, North Carolina, began billing customers and the, uh, and they expect the full contracted run rate billing across 40 megawatts of critical IT load later in August.
So it's a, an $865 million 10-year lease with a total backlog crossing a billion dollars for the company.
And then, uh, this August, in their announcement, they announced that they brought in roughly s- $360 million of fresh GPU contracts, including their, uh, the company's first, uh, Nvidia Vera Rubin deployment, which I'll circle back on in a second.
Um, their remaining performance obligations, uh, or RPO of contracted future revenue not delivered, is just right at a billion dollars.
Their multiple on invested capital, um, uh, comes from a parent loan requiring paying back at 1.1x the principal minimum, uh, regardless of how fast.
It's a 10% minimum return on 90 new money and which is why the annualized rate on that is at 50.6%. Um,
they also paid, WhiteFiber also paid $120 million of the convert proceeds for the right to receive 5.9 million of its own shares in 2031. This is basically a prepaid buyback that offsets convert dilution.
So here's some, there's some bullish and some, uh, arguably bearish takes from the earnings. Uh, NC1 in North Carolina, billing has commenced. This is bullish.
And per this morning's release, Sam Tabar says that they expect full contracted run rate billing across the 40 megawatts of contracted critical IT load later this month.
This means in Q3, which we are entering into now, is a major revenue inflection quarter for WhiteFiber. Um, this is also just a blitz of money from like prepaying customers. Uh, one customer, Base10,
165.2 million, buying 1,392 Blackwell 300s. Prime Intellect with 108.2 million for 576 Vera Rubin 200s.
Uh, and, uh, 87.5 million for 576 B300s in Iceland. So that brings a total of 635 million of new contracts signed year to date.
On the Vera Rubins from Prime Intellect, this is the first Vera Rubin deployment for WhiteFiber, which interestingly, um, this is, uh, according to the, the quarterly earnings today, the first disclosed, uh, Rubin customer from a small cap Neocloud.
So the big hyperscalers are getting them, but this is the first like smaller cap company to actually, uh, get this deal from Nvidia.
Nvidia, as we know, kind of plays a bit of kingmaker, both in financing and then who gets their primo hardware. So, uh, my take on this is that getting allocation to brand new Nvidia silicon is like a stamp of approval.
Um, so shout out to them. Um, they have exclusivity with a consortium of lenders on NC1, um, now in diligence and documentations. If it closes, the 50.6-...
percent, uh, annualized bridge, uh, loan, uh, kind of solves itself, and, uh, that capital goes back into the 1.5 gigawatt pipeline. Um, some bearish takes. Uh, organic,
their organic quarter on quarter went backwards.
Um, their monthly GPU revenue de- actually decreased, um, because of the customer termination, but the aggregate revenue, uh, total revenue increased from the, uh, termination fee.
Um, and then I don't know if this is bearish or bullish. They have seven customers compared to the CoreWeave's three, as we had earlier. It's like these don't seem like a lot of customers.
Typically, you want to follow like a Pareto principle or something, but- Well, CoreWeave has more than three, but three are 72% of the business. Exa- well, okay, exactly.
And in this case, the largest of the seven customers for, uh, White Fiber, the largest is 63% of the first half of the year revenue.
So, and then the entire growth of the company in, at NC1 is one tenant, which is pretty par for the course. It's just, it's a kind of highly concentrated, narrow, uh, client base.
And then, uh, the company's not currently very liquid. They have 56 million in cash, 28.6 working capital deficit, um, and they have- 486 million in cash? I think so. [laughs] If I'm looking at...
Yeah, if I've, if I've gotten... Yeah. Um, so, uh, they have 485 million of construct- of, uh, construction in progress, and they had to draw another, uh, 30 million of the parent bridge money, uh, last month.
So, uh, this could be, uh, financing, uh, this, you know, could be the, the financing, uh, crunch.
Um, I can toss it to you, Colin, but I think more interesting to me, 'cause I'm not really that much of a finance guy, kind of something like that, I'm interested in like the GPU and per megawatt comps, which I've got pulled up, which are pretty- Yeah, those are super interesting.
Let's get into those. Okay. This is what's really interesting. Finally to the part of the, the part of the segment I understand better.
Um, Inscale's deal at NC1 is 865 million for 10 years on 40 megawatts of critical IT, which comes out to 2.2 million per megawatt of critical IT per year. Um,
this is pretty well inside the range that we're seeing everyone else, so it reinforces, uh, pretty much industry standard. Um, now, uh, the, the difference is, is that, uh,
Inscale is not technically directly the, uh, investment grade credit. They are backed by, they have Microsoft, but they themselves are kind of like a, um, operating arm of that company. Um,
and then Cerebras, uh, comes in also at about 2.4 million, uh, US dollars per megawatt per critical IT per year. Colin, do you have any thoughts on the per megawatt power rates?
Um, White Fiber is... Uh, my, my, my question, uh, let me see. Let me just read this really quickly. I mean, they're a Neocloud, right? Mm-hmm. I mean, uh, you know,
I, I would like to run some analysis really quickly with regards to like, uh, compar- comps, but that's like $2.2 million per megawatt is kind of almost in the PowerShell range of megawatt- Yeah, it is... which,
you know, part of the bull case for the Neocloud, this is why Iron has, you know, outcompeted most of its former Bitcoin miners.
Um, I mean, they're vertically integrated, so this is part of it too, but the idea being that like owning the GPUs is the most valuable part of the chain currently for anyone selling compute or moving into co-location.
So m- my question would just be, you know, what,
w- h-how do you square $2.2 million per megawatt versus PowerShell getting the same thing for just running the infrastructure and having much less risk, also much less CapEx, right?
And also, what does it say about the value of what this, uh, of this compute with regards to how it is being used, um, at the end of the chain? So I mean, that, that's the first thing that stood out to me.
I would have expected- Okay... it to be a little bit higher, but I need to hold my tongue and actually like do some analysis with regards to like what are we seeing with what Iron's getting?
What are we seeing with what CoreWeave and Nebius is getting in terms of dollars per megawatt? I don't think the deals are as transparent for the bigger Neoclouds, though I, I will say that much.
They don't, they're not disclosing these numbers, I don't think, a- as granularly as White Fiber is, which, you know, they don't really have to because they're the two biggest sharks in the pond. Yeah.
Well, let's look at GPU hours. Um, so, uh,
roughly, so the Prime Intellect deal with, uh, the Vera Rubin works out to about 188,000 per GPU over three hou- over three years, which is seven bucks per GPU hour at full utilization.
And Base10's B300 deal at 119K per GPU, uh, comes out to 4.5 bucks per hour. Uh, so if we were to compare Morgan Stanley
saying the Vera Rubin 200's NVL 72 rack costing at 7.8 million, which is double the, the B- Blackwell then- Um,
576 GPUs equals eight racks equals 62 million of hardware against an 108 million of contracted revenue. So, uh,
this does reveal a bit about the cost of the Vera Rubins, their rental rates, uh, their, their actual contracted rental rates.
And, uh, can at least, like, now we have a great, like, reference point in real contracted, uh, numbers for this particular GPU stack.
I don't have a lot of insight to this at the current moment, but it's great to have, like, a number from Morgan Stanley and then s- and then, um, settle... And then, uh, contracted, uh, on the White Fiber side.
Um, another story that I ha- another little interesting insight from this is, you know, on the GPU depreciation story that we were talking about earlier with Brandon at, from CoreWeave.
Um, White Fiber actually sold some used H- H200s for 26.1 million, and they had a book value of 24.3 million, so they gained money on these H200s, these used H200s.
So they're clearing above their book value. Uh, this contradicts the GPU, uh, depreciation schedule.
Again, the theme this week has been for Neoclouds, GPUs aren't depreciating as much in their useful life, and actual market value is higher than book. Um, so, uh, yeah.
Um, I have one last comment, which is kind of an open question for Sam, who's on tomorrow. Um, but- Before you get to that, uh, we need to fact-check ourself and wipe, wipe some egg off of our face. Okay.
Yeah, I thought that this didn't make sense to me.
So yeah, White Fiber, it, it's weird because some of their language suggests that they're actually running the GPUs, but they're, they're just a powered shell for these deals. Okay.
So 2.2 to $2.4 million per megawatt is, is on, uh, is, is, is kind of in the ballpark of what we've been seeing from most of the- Okay... board. So. Okay, great. Um,
okay, so, uh, question for Sam tomorrow is the 10-Q says that Duke Energy, um, s- the study from Duke Energy, uh, supports up to 200 megawatts gross at, uh, the North Carolina site NC1.
However, their press release this morning says that that site has the potential to scale up to 300 gross megawatts, so leaves 100 megawatt gap. Curious where the extra power comes from.
So that's kind of interesting, uh, disparity between the Duke study and the, uh, uh, uh, their, uh, their earnings this morning. So that's all I've got for, uh, White Fiber.
Um, you can toss any comments on it or- I, I don't really have anything else, just, uh, eager to get Sam on to talk about some of the... I'm curious about that contract that lapsed,
um, or that the, you know, that was pulled. Um, few questions for him tomorrow, but if y'all are interested in learning more, tune in. Uh, we really don't cover White Fiber that much.
We should probably add them- No, we don't. We probably should... to the coverage.
You know, they were spun off from Bit Digital specifically for the, uh, HPC segment, and then Bit Digital, I think, was like being rebranded as an eth strategy play.
I, I don't really know what's [chuckles] going on with that. I would imagine that that's probably, uh, not really top of mind for most people. So I think we can go ahead and move on to the, uh, to the final segment here.
Yeah, which I totally have pulled up. [laughs] Um, I don't have the story pulled up, uh, right now. It's all right.
Just give us the TLDR, 'cause this is an interesting one with regards to how the entire crypto world is reshaping itself in the image of the AI machine god. Yeah. So here's the, the TLDR.
Uh, Wintermute, which if you're in crypto, you know their name, they're the largest market maker. And, uh, Wintermute plans $1 billion AI push into traditial-- into traditional markets. Um, say no more.
I mean, uh, this is one of the most profitable, successful market makers in crypto, uh,
who is realizing that they need to, uh, start trading against the likes of Jane Street and Citadel, and actually playing with the big boys because mar- the Bitcoin market is now a dwindling...
Not just Bitcoin, crypto broadly is a dwindling market cap. So they intend to invest about a billion dollars into high-frequency trading and artificial intelligent data center construction over the next five years.
Uh, founder and chief executive offer, uh, officer Evgeny, uh, Gavril in this, uh, interview for the story said, "We are now going up against firms that have spent decades optimizing their technology and infrastructure for these markets, so obviously the level of investment required is significant."
As per the Bloomberg article, the $1 billion commitment underscores how steep the price of admission into Wall Street's high-octane markets has become. Uh, so,
uh, Alex Garco's quant trading firm, XTX Markets, said last year that it would spend a billion dollars building five data centers in Finland, uh, for machine learning.
So Jane Street also- Absolutely dumping money into data centers to keep pace with computing power demands.
Note, one of those data centers down the street from me, about an hour south of me, uh, in a little town called Okmulgee, I believe. So, um, you know the joke is, Colin,
uh, whenever you've been trading shit coins, uh, you've been trading against Wintermute, and this is more or less kind of confirmed in, in, at different levels.
Now Wintermute gets to, uh, see the other side of the coin, 'cause they'll be trading against Ken Griffin and Jane Street. So. Yeah. That's, yeah.
We'll see what happens when they have to go gloves on against some of the titans of, of capital. Yeah. It's kinda like, you know, Jake Paul fighting Mike Tyson. Yeah, but Jake Paul got paid, so he still got paid a lot.
No, my point though is it's like he was always, like, doing these boxing fights against, like, older boxers, and it's like, okay, like, how about you go up against, like, the current heavyweight champion?
I mean, you could, but, um- You can get your sm- your first conviction...
for a, for a, yeah, for a, for a kid who ma- who got famous on Vine and then transitioned to YouTube with his goofy rapper wannabe brother, I would say going up and even beating George Foreman, not in his prime, beating George Foreman.
Not George Foreman. Mike Tyson? Mike Tyson, my bad. Yeah. I mean [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. Dude used to be on Disney Channel. Yeah. And the kids these days don't understand how great Vine was. TikTok- It wasn't-...
is a shadow of what Vine used to be. Once again, Vine was ahead of its time. Uh, so on that note, that's the show today. Um, I will call everyone's attention to, once again,
earnings week. We're halfway through. Today's Wednesday. Tomorrow, Thursday, we have Ben Gagnon, CEO and captain of Keel. Sam, push from today to tomorrow for WhiteFiber.
Soluna watch party tomorrow as well on our channels, and then Mike Pitchy of Solana, sorry, Soluna, on Friday.
Thank you very much for watching Block Space Live every w- day, every win- every weekday at 1:00 PM Eastern, uh, we are Compute's daily live show.
Shout out to our sponsor, brought to you by CleanSpark, NASDAQ listed, ticker CLSK. I'm Charlie. I'm Colin. We'll see you tomorrow. [outro music]