On y'all. Welcome back to Blockspace Live, presented by CleanSpark.
We are rolling through earnings week, week two, and today we've got two banger interviews with, first, Sam Tabar of White Fiber, CEO of White Fiber, to discuss their Q2 earnings, some questions we have on their blended cloud and powered shell business segments.
Following that, we will be tackling Iron delivering the first tranche of 50 megawatts to Microsoft at its Childress facility in Texas.
And then we have none other than Captain Keel himself, Ben Gagnon, CEO of Keel, to discuss their Q2 earnings and what it's going to take to get their sites in Pennsylvania across the finish line for their first tenant, and also why they decided to decline an expansion for 10 megawatts at their site in Washington.
To round off the show, [smacks lips] we've got a feel-good story for y'all.
Specifically, how data centers are bringing additional tax revenue and helping to enrich public services at the localities in which they are based.
Little data center propaganda for y'all today, but we have to look at the facts on the ground as to how these are actually helping communities, given how much vociferous pushback there has been all across the US for building in certain places.
That's right. Blockspace goes live every weekday at 1:00 PM Eastern. We are compute's daily live show featuring quick hits on AI, data centers, emerging technology, and markets.
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Again, our website, blockspace.media. This live stream is brought to you by CleanSpark, NASDAQ listed ticker CLSK. More on them later on in the show. And we are on day four of week two of earnings week two.
Play the intro. [upbeat music] Yeah, uh, we're not gonna do an earnings update today 'cause we have back-to-back, uh, CEO interviews with, uh, your, the who's who of the Neocloud and Powershell game.
But before that, I wanna show, um, that here's a little teaser of what we're, uh, what, what the week's looked like so far.
Um, today we have Ben of Keel, Sam of, uh, White Fiber, and they were doing an earnings stream of Soluna at the end of the day. And tomorrow we have Soluna CFO, Mike Pichey to close out the earnings week coverage.
For those of you who've been paying attention, thank you very much. We've enjoyed it. Tell us what you do and don't want to see next earnings.
Again, this is roughly every quarter, so three months, we'll just run it back. Uh, that's what I have on the earnings, Colin. Um, I think if you're ready, we can bring up Sam. Yeah, let's get Sam up here.
Yeah, he's in the wings. He's dressed for today with that sports coat. Oh my goodness, looking sharp. Sam, welcome to the show. Yeah, I just wanted to look good for you guys, you know. [laughs] Yeah.
Every day is earnings day. Uh, well, [claps hands] so we've got you for a little bit here. Um, I'll just jump in and, uh, throw the first question out, which is,
so, uh, you had a customer pay $12.3 million to walk away from the deal, and that's in the light of this being one of the tightest GPU markets we've ever seen. Um, that's like the only thing people care about.
Uh, why was this deal terminated, or did you guys push to terminate? Did the tenant push to terminate? Um, yeah, I'm kinda curious, like, behind this termination here.
I mean, well, first of all, we're, we're not unhappy about it. Uh, we were able to recognize $12.3 million of, uh, termination-related revenue, uh, in the second quarter.
The total termination payment is approximately $15.7 million, with the remaining amount, um, expected to be collected in subsequent quarters.
The benefit to profitability, uh, was partially offset by the associated equipment lease.
We also experienced some downtime, uh, while transitioning that capacity to replacement customers, and those replacement contracts were signed at lower rates than the original agreement.
But that's exactly why pr- contractual protections matter.
The termination, [car engine revs] uh, payment helped bridge the economic difference and protect the value of the original engagement while we re- r- pl- while we redeployed the equipment.
So we were able to turn a customer termination into an orderly transition rather than a permanent loss of value. And more importantly, we have moved well beyond that transition.
Since our last earnings call, we have signed more than $540 million of new multi-year cloud services agreements.
So as those deployments begin entering later this year, we expect them to drive substantial growth in rec- recurring cloud revenue. Uh, so Sam, kind of just a quick follow-up question there for the specifics.
The replacement, is that inside the $540 million cloud revenue, as- Partially, yeah... discussed on the 10-Q? Partially. And, and the, the revenue has already commenced, correct? Yeah, some of it. So our...
Yes, def- I believe so, yes. The, the $540 million, some of that I believe has already commenced, but there, it, that's gonna, a lot of it is taking place over the next few months.
Our cloud pipeline is just surprisingly very strong. Um, several of these agreements were just signed over the past several weeks.
Uh, we're seeing real commercial momentum, um, as larger customers consolidate deployments with providers that can source advanced hardware, execute complex deployments, and operate them reliably.
Uh, you know, these include Nvidia B300 deployments in Ontario, uh- Even Vera Rubin deployments, uh, we've been able to, uh, do, and that's- there are not many of our peers that can say that they've been doing Vera Rubin deployments.
So these are, these are high-quality counterparties. We're doing very high-quality sophisticated work. Um, and, uh, I'm just really proud of the momentum and the reputation that our cloud business is, is doing.
And I should just reiterate that our cloud business and our colocation business are two different teams, and, uh, they're just-- they're two different operations. There's no crossover.
There is gonna be some potential crossover in the near future, but those are two different revenue line items for White Fiber. And, um, 'cause you brought up Vera Rubin, I'll-- let's jump straight to a GPU question.
So, um, it looks like Prime Intellect's Rubin deal, if I'm doing the math right, comes out to roughly, like, $7 per GPU hour, and Morgan Stanley says it costs, what, $7.8 million to build one of those racks, which is about double what the Blackwell hardware costs, so it's a bit of a price premium.
Like, what do you think about Rubin, uh, it just in terms of, like, CapEx per dollar versus Blackwell? Also, like, how did you guys get the NVIDIA deal? Like, one of the- the first small cap Rubin allocation.
I'm kind of-- Yeah, what's going on there? Yeah, listen, I'd like to focus on, on that, especially that [coughs] excuse me, that second part of the question is really important.
We have really-- We have very deep and excellent relationships with NVIDIA. They've been our partner for a very long time.
In fact, th-that relationship occurred, um, th-this is a little-known fact, but NVIDIA's revenues, once upon a time, over ten percent of it was because they were building, uh, ETH mining machines when Ethereum was under proof of work, before it shifted over to proof of stake.
And those relationships during those a- now ancient days continue to carry over.
Uh, we were one of the only Bitcoin miners once, when we were a Bitcoin miner, to actually do ETH mining, and so that, that r- those relationships with NVIDIA carry over from, from many, many years.
And so our relationships go way back. They go very deep. And you're right, it's not very common.
In fact, I can't think of any other peer that was able to get their hands on Vera Rubin, and that's a testament to our relationship with NVIDIA. And yeah, so I'm curious, uh, just the, the GPU economics.
I mean, uh, the, the Rubins for Prime Intellect, uh, just higher CapEx, a premium. What do you think? I mean, how do you think about GPU economics and signing those deals?
Well, the con- the contract- And I'll kind of-- Uh, sorry, Sam, I'll tack on something with that 'cause I believe in the earnings call y'all mentioned that the H-- uh, the, the Hoppers are s- are actually worth more for GPU hour than when you, uh, when, when y'all deployed them at first.
So just on to Charlie's question, like, how do you think about that- Yeah, there are a lot of questions there. Um- [laughs] Just
taking a, taking a step back, the contract structures have also become considerably more attractive in this business.
We target strong returns during the initial contract term and underwrite the economics without assuming any residual value for the GPUs.
Very importantly, customer prepayments and third-party equipment financing further, uh, reduce the amount of White Fiber balance sheet capital required.
At, at the same time, um, evidence does continue to build that high-end GPUs can have very high useful economic life well beyond three years.
I think-- I know that for accounting purposes they're written off after three years, but that is just false. The, the economic value of these GPUs live well beyond three years.
But for accounting purposes, there's an ultra-conservative, and I would say unreasonable, standpoint on writing these off after three years.
That creates the potential upside after the initial contract term, but we do not need to rely on that residual value to attract-- to generate attractive returns.
So based on contracts signed to date, our cloud services portfolio is expected to generate more than two hundred million dollars of annualized revenue once fully deployed.
So we have substantial contracted growth ahead of us, increasingly attractive unit economics, and a capital-efficient model for bringing these deployments online because we use customer prepayments and third-party financing.
We don't use our balance sheet. And also, to support that growth, we entered into a partnership, um, with data center developer and operator Krembu.
This partnership gives White Fiber Cloud access to one hundred megawatts in 2027, which is a significant expansion on our current megawatt footprint.
So we, we have the demand, frankly, to fill all this capacity, and we're actively working to secure end place customers as we speak. So Sam, I wanna s- uh, sw- uh, shift our attention to NC1 here.
A lot of analyst words were spilled on the call about this super quick timeline, uh, for deployment. Yeah. So y'all have got the fifty-four megawatt gross.
Next is forty-five megawatt gross, and you're evaluating an additional two hundred megawatts for three hundred megawatt gross. Curious, the 10-Q says the Duke study supports up to two hundred megawatt gross.
Is that just for the expanded tranche, or is that for- They-- Yeah, on top of the, on top of the second tranche that we're getting it. That's right. That would be on top of, so that's three hundred in total. Okay.
Um, yeah, so a- uh, any updates you can give us on that study timeline here, and also, um, anything that might be standing in the way of getting that two hundred megawatts, or if y'all are pretty confident that that's gonna come through sooner than later?
We have a great relationship with the utility company. We have a great relationship with the community, um, and that is important to have. And we have a great relationship with, with customers.
Ju-just taking a step back, you know, this is not our first rodeo. We've been able to take Facilities that were left for dead and transform them, transform them into very sophisticated AI campuses in record time.
And we were able to do that for Cerebras, where we took a mattress factory and we turned that into a very sophisticated tier three data center in six months and on budget.
We were able to take a one million square foot textile factory that we bought from Unifi. We turned that into a data center for Enscale. They're about to IPO. By the way, Cerebras has since IPO'd.
And so NC1 now has moved from construction into active customer deployment as we speak. Initial billing has commenced. Equipment startup and customer testing is underway.
Uh, and we continue to expect the full contracted run rate billing across the full 40 megawatts of contracted IT load later this, this month.
So, and we also, you, you, you hinted to it, uh, we see meaningful expansion potential at this campus. We expect to begin marketing the next approximate 45 megawatts of gross capacity in the very near term.
Everybody-- we're getting very overwe- overwhelmingly strong interest for that second tranche. I know it's a very juicy tranche that everybody is after.
Our existing customer at Enscale has certain priority rights, but we will evaluate the opportunities based on customer credit quality, based on the economics, which we think is gonna be premium, financeability, and of course, client concentration questions.
Longer term, we are working, to answer your question directly, we are working with the utility on a transmission study that could support approximately 200 megawatts of additional power, and if completed, that will turn NC1 into approximately 300 meg- gross megawatts over time.
NC1 remains our flagship campus. It has the potential to support several phases of growth for White Fiber.
We intend to develop, um, that opportunity responsibly, maintain a high standard of execution, and continue to be a, a very strong long-term partner to the Madison community.
We actually sat down with the community physically face-to-face. We had a one-day community, um, day where we engaged with the community, answered all sorts of questions.
There were concerns and worries about our uses of water. We showed them that the way we, we manage water will be eighty-five percent less than the previous tenant. They had concerns and questions about noise.
We showed them there will be mu- dramatically less noise than the previous tenant. That's really, you know, that's just a couple of examples.
There are many examples of the benefits of a retrofit as opposed to greenfield, and a lot of the pushback on data centers is really against retro-- against greenfield.
And we have a winning formula, and we have know-how in retrofits.
And that, we think, and we've experienced, that doesn't really get into a lot of resistance with the community because that building was already there, and we can show that we could be a far better tenant than the previous tenant was.
So it's a win-win, uh, for everyone.
But anyway, taking a step back from the community engagement, which I think is important, and by the way, there's a CNN, um, uh, piece about it that just came out the other day about White Fiber and its unique approach to retrofits and how that aligns well with, uh, community concerns.
Our immediate priority is just to complete this initial deployment,
reach the contractual run rate billing, and from there, the next phase is to secure the right customer with the remaining capacity and continue scaling NC1 in a very disciplined way.
Y- when you were talking in that response about securing the next customer, you specifically, specifically brought up, like, credit profile and financeability.
So I do wanna ask, your, your CFO on the call, Justin Zhu, mentioned that the financing process for re-refining the bridge loan for NC1 has, quote, "taken longer than expected," and that certain contractual features would have made it easier to finance.
Can you speak to what some of those features would have been? Yeah. Um, maybe why it's taken longer than y'all would hope to get financing here, and what's a realistic timeline for closing this financing?
Well, we just recently got into an exclusivity with extremely well-known lenders, and we're now going through the process of diligence, and it's, it's customary diligence.
It has taken longer than I had expected, but, um, but I'm very excited that once this is done, that'll be the turn-- the flywheel that we've been telling the markets we can do, which is find a site, get a good customer, build a thing on-- in record light speed time, and then finance it with well-known lenders and pull our equity out and recycle the capital, wash, rinse, repeat.
If we could just show that one turn, everybody will believe that we could actually do this flywheel. So really looking forward to getting this project finance-- this permanent financing done.
Um, I'm spending a lot of my calories and time on that one work stream, and, uh, and yeah, to-- m-more, more, please, you know, stay tuned on, on, on, uh, on that.
But I am advised by my lawyers that whenever I talk about that particular financing, I have to say, um, that, uh, there's no guarantee that the financing will be done at all or on favorable terms.
So that's, uh, some legal jargon I've, I've got to, uh, say. Gotta have the caveats, right? Yeah. Right. It, uh, it makes total sense.
Sam, as a kind of a closing question, I want to hone in on the two separate business lines. Uh, y'all mentioned that the co-location and powered shell and also the cloud businesses, uh, the teams are work siloed.
There's a potential that they might work together in the future. But White Fiber is kind of an interesting company within this universe in the sense that y'all are doing both at the same time.
That's very rare from what we've seen from the companies that spun out from Ethereum or Bitcoin mining into this, into this universe.
And so y-you spoke to this on the call a little bit, but I'd love for you to unpack it a little bit more here.
And you mentioned that White Fiber blending co-location and cloud Is, quote, "An ongoing debate we are having internally," end quote.
And I'm just curious, what does integration look like in practice, and on what timeline? Like, you've got these powered shells.
Does that eventually mean that maybe if the economics makes sense, you move your own cloud segment into these facilities? Um, what does blending actually look like?
And how do you balance the risk of potentially compressing whichever segment currently carries the higher multiple by balancing both of those or blending the segments in the future?
Well, for now, like both, both-- You're right. They're both, these teams are siloed. [coughs] These teams are siloed, and i- if there's gonna be a blending of the two, it has to make economic sense.
There's no sweetheart situation. It has to, you know, the, the, the, the cloud team has to make its case to the co-location team. And right now, we are seeing that case.
Um, at our Montreal Two lo- location, we've restarted development there.
We're evaluating the site for both co-location customers with potential White Fiber cloud deployments, and that does create an opportunity for us to capture economics from the data center side and the GPU infrastructure operating inside it.
We'll be double-dipping in many ways, and we're targeting that, um, by around year-end. So that's very exciting. That'll be the first time where the teams are combining forces and making very attractive economics occur.
And yes, I agree with you. It-- You're right. It's extremely rare for a company to have both a successful co-location business and a successful cloud business. White Fiber has both. Sam, thank you so much.
Really appreciate you taking the time. Congrats on the quarter. Best of luck throughout the rest of the year, and we'll, we'll be checking in after Q3, see how developments are going. I look forward to that call.
Thank you, Sam. Thanks, Sam. All right. Take care. All right. We're gonna keep on rolling.
Next, we're gonna talk about Eiran delivering Horizon One, and then we'll have Captain Keel Ben Gagnon on for an extended interview, and then we'll cap it off with a CNN article, uh, about how data centers are helping small towns.
But before we go to Eiran, a word from our sponsor, CleanSpark. [gentle music] We are CleanSpark, America's Bitcoin miner, a publicly traded company with the largest operating hash rate,
powered entirely by self-operated infrastructure across four states. This is our proof of work, and we are setting the standard for what's next.
Learn more about the intersection of energy and Bitcoin at cleanspark.com. All righty, Charlie. Long-awaited update from Eiran here.
Headline from Blockspace: "Eiran delivers first 50 megawatt AI cloud deployment at Childress, Texas, facility."
There was a lot of hemming and hawing, Charlie, after Eiran's quarterly update recently, that they had been behind schedule on this. From what I can tell, that's not actually true.
I think- I think this is on schedule, right? Yes, it is. Yeah. And I don't really understand where people were coming from in saying, like, "We're still waiting for Microsoft."
Well, the forward guidance that Eiran's given aligns with what we're seeing right now. But we'll, we'll get into the, the details there before I kind of bring the receipts for this being more on time than not.
So specifically, this is related to Eiran's deal with Microsoft at Childress. That is a $9.7 billion five-year cloud services agreement for the compute capacity at Childress.
The first 50 megawatts of critical IT load f- is for direct to chip liquid cooled, uh, GPUs. Separately, NVIDIA granted Eiran, quote, "exemplar," end quote, cloud status, uh, after testing the GB300s at the site.
[lip smack] So this is just 50 megawatts. It's about 10% of the 480 megawatt gross AI capacity Eiran is targeting for 2026.
Delivery is still pending this year for the three Microsoft phases, totaling a combined 150 megawatts.
Roberts, quote, in the press release, points that there are, quote, "Horizons Two to Four later this year," end quote.
So closing that 150 megawatt gap in the remaining, you know, four and a half months we have in 2026 is really a pretty big execution question on Horizon One's timing. Market loved the news.
Shares moved between 5 to 6.5% after, um, this was announced. [lip smack] And it's-- Again, this is something that has been long awaited for Eiran.
It's, you know, an, a cloud contract with one of the largest tech companies in the world. And Eiran's own stated guidance said that, uh, delivery was not late.
It's within the, quote, "through 2026," end quote, window that the company has always used. Not really sure where this narrative comes from.
In mid-June, sell side and social commentary had converged on a Q3 2026 target, roughly through July or September. We're firmly within that window on the Horizon One handoff.
Um, apparently, there was some unconfirmed rumor that circulated, um, for a July 19th handoff date. Um, but there was nothing official behind that.
Uh, you know, Eiran has been very explicit with this site, um, that they were expecting a Q3 2026 online date for Horizon One, so. Do you think it might have been, like, people looking at, um,
like, satellite images and thinking that stuff's not in place on time or something like that? Maybe. 'Cause that seems to be a lot of, like, the timeline questions.
People want to see, like, s- timestamps, satellite images, generators getting hooked up, dry-- That kind of stuff, so. Yeah, I, I wonder about that.
You know, I, I don't have any information as to whether or not that's true.
I will say, kind of to your point, it'd be very easy for a kind of amateur sleuth online to look at satellite images and either one, [laughs] have no idea what they're looking at.
[laughs] Or two, not looking at the timestamp for the satellite, right? 'Cause like if you go- Yeah... to Google Earth,
there can be a huge gap between current imagery and what is actually sh- or, uh, you know, the current state- Yeah... of things versus what's actually shown.
There are some more expensive kind of enterprise satellite, uh, imaging services that have, like, real time updates. There's some really good ones though if, if you're interested in kind of tracking this.
Uh, there's a company called OnX that does satellite imagery for- Man, you're blowing all of our alpha. But [laughs] keep going.
Well, I, you know, if people are interested, they, they do satellite imagery for, uh, ex- you know, outdoor sporting enthusiasts. So, like, they have, like, an OnX Hunt
line where you can look at, you know, Bureau of Land Management land, uh, public land for use for hunting, things like that. They also have off-road, [clicks tongue] um, and trying to think of, of the other one.
Back Country, I think, and I think it's one of those two, On Ro- Off Road or Back Country, that has, like, pretty, pretty, uh, good, not real time updates, but they update it, like, weekly, I think, most of the satellite imagery.
That's all you really need. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Right, I mean, like, it j- oh, you're not gonna quibble over having a 24 hour... A, a seven-day lag versus a 24-hour lag, I think, on these images. Not yet.
But- Not until we reach peak acceleration, but yeah. [laughs] Yeah. Yeah, precisely.
So, you know, I, I think just, g- to go back to the original thing about there being mismatched expectations here, I do think it's a reminder that you really have to dig into company disclosures if you wanna verify what some analysts and, and armchair traders are saying about these things.
And just to recap, you know, I think the bigger question is how quickly do they move on the rest of the Horizon build-outs, 'cause they have another 150 megawatts, um [swallows], or they have another 100 megawatts to come online for, um, the, for, for Microsoft here.
Or sorry, excuse me, 150 megawatts o- uh, um, for the rest of the year. Believe the deal's for 200. So. Yeah. I do have, uh, a very snazzy video from Iron that they dropped this morning, uh, on this announcement.
And I don't wanna always play everybody's video, but this one's a cool video. So I'm gonna roll tape here and, uh, show it 'cause it's pretty clean.
For those of you who are listening, I apologize, uh, it features great drone flyover oversight. [gentle music] Today, Microsoft accepted delivery of Horizon One.
Purpose-built for AI. 50 megawatts of IT load. Direct to chip liquid cooling. Power dense design, high bandwidth fiber, engineered from day one for the densest compute clusters in the world.
Confirmed by NVIDIA as an exemplar cloud for GB400. We developed it. We built it. Now we operate it. From engineering and procurement through construction, commissioning and handover.
Owning the critical paths is how we deliver with speed and certainty. Thousands of people on site, every work stream managed in-house, delivered safely on an accelerated timeline.
Horizons 2, 3 and 4 now follow through the remainder of 2026. Each build strengthens the platform. Each one shortens our time to compute. Horizon One delivered.
[gentle music] Two, two comments here. Yeah. One, Dan Roberts giving Harry Sudock a little run for his money there as- Yeah... the in-house voiceover for company announcements.
But of course, that's as an American, and we Americans like to fetishize- [laughs]... other Anglo accents, you know, whether it be British or Australian.
That being said, it really is a very clean video and a rare glimpse into what some of these data centers actually look like once they're on the ground. Actually, three comments.
Second one, gotta get the solar panels in there out in front. Yeah. You know? Like [laughs] Iron really- Go back to the roots. Go back to the roots.
Renewable, Ir- you know, uh, Australian- Well, and that was their pitch with Bitcoin mining Yeah I mean, in the early days they were the 100% renewable energy Bitcoin miner and a lot, that [laughs] you know.
I mean, that's how everybody, that's how, that's how CleanSpark was. Yeah, and, and- But they were more just clean energy data, you know, in general. Right.
And I think that for, um, for Iron specifically, renewable energy credit's doing a lot of lifting there. I mean, certainly you're not powering that entire data center with solar out in Texas, right?
I mean, great penetration of solar and wind in Texas, depending on the day, 20 to 30% of the electricity produced, but base load is king, my guy. Third thing, direct to chip liquid cooling.
Water user, water user, uh, uh, water use FUDsters in shambles, dude. [laughs] You know?
I mean, literally you should just send that to people who are worried about AI destroying water reservoirs because that right there just, uh, you know, throws egg onto that narrative, so.
You say that, don't underestimate how, how deranged the Facebook groups can get, Colin. They can get very, very crazy very, very quickly. I would know.
Um, if you're interested in following that narrative, uh, we will be posting a little bit more, uh, peek behind the curtain of the, uh, anti-data center, uh, Facebook mob on our social media.
But we're not gonna linger on that too much because we have Captain Keel in the wings, Ben Gagnon, Keel Infrastructure, who we'll bring on up here for an interview right after a word from our sponsor, Luxur.
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So if you'd like to learn more, go to luxur.tech/commander to get started. All right, we've got CEO of Keel, Ben Gagnon, in the wings, and we are gonna bring him up and unpack this Q2. Ben, welcome- Ben...
to the show, sir. Appreciate you taking the time. It's nice to be here. Great. Always great to have you on, man. We've got a lot to chew through, so we're just gonna go ahead and dive right in. Let's do it.
This was brought up on the Q2 call. Also, there have been a lot of questions from investors following the Q2 call, specifically about the three-deal target for end of year 2026.
Just out in front, does that timeline still stand? Are you still confident on it? Are we stretching it out? Do you have any updates for that? Yeah. Um, look, we remain incredibly confident here.
Um, the commercial process is going so smoothly across all three sites. Uh, we've got multiple high-quality tenants actively at three different tables.
And everything that we've seen over the last couple of months is really only reinforcing our confidence, uh, in the assets, in the commercial process, and the demand for the power.
'Cause, you know, when you have these conversations and, and you have a lot of different people who are reaching out to Powur, uh, it all just comes down to timelines.
And everyone's looking at, how do you get 2027 delivery? And when you are so focused on 2027 delivery, you know, frankly, you're just a lot more time sensitive than we are as the developer, right?
We're coming in here for 15 to, to 20 years of contracted revenue. Um, and, you know, whether or not it starts in March or April, like, really does not matter in the grand scheme of things.
These are, you know, 15 to 20-year agreements. If the start date is plus or minus, you know, a few days, weeks, or months, it really doesn't change things in the grand scheme of things. But for customers, it's huge.
And so each tenant we have at our table knows there are other tenants too.
And the fact that we've been able to go through this commercial process without granting exclusivity at this stage is a huge accomplishment in itself, and I think it's a testament to the demand that we have and the power that people are willing to go through a process which is more competitive than obviously they would like because they are so eager to get the timelines that we have.
And so, look, if you want '27 power, uh, you probably just don't have the luxury of dragging out negotiations over nice-to-haves.
And if you do, you're either gonna push out your own timelines, or maybe you lose the megawatts entirely to someone else. And so that's what keeps real tension in the process and keeps everyone engaged.
And if you think back to what we outlined 18 months ago, it is exactly [chuckles] the strategy that we said that we were gonna execute against.
We said we wanted to minimize the time between signing a lease and generating the first revenues and bringing that lease online because it's going to play into the improving macroeconomic, and it's going to play into the improving power scarcity.
It's going to play into de-risking the sites for, for Keel and our assets, and ultimately, it should drive better commercial outcomes and economics. And, uh, that's exactly where we are today.
So yeah, we are incredibly confident on our commercial processes. So moving on into the Pennsylvania site specifically, I wanna kind of talk about permitting and, uh, environmental regs.
A kind of multi-part question here. I'll just kinda start with th- this first off.
I-i-if there is anything standing in the way between these leases kind of being signed and then broadcasted to the public, is it permitting and final sign-off for the sites that you have in Pennsylvania?
Can you speak to that a bit?
Yeah, let me kind of also just speak to, like, what is the general framework for walking through one of these commercial processes, because they're, they're highly similar across all different tenants and across all different sites.
And the very first thing that you do is you do a quick back of the envelope check on timelines and economics, right? You're not negotiating at that point.
You're just validating for both sides that this is something worth pursuing and is a solution for the tenants, and it is attractive for the developer.
Once you're through that initial back check, the next thing that you do, and this is the vast, vast, vast majority of the time, the work, the conversations, it's construction and engineering and technical teams working with construction, engineering, and technical teams, right?
So our teams work with the potential tenant teams. They work alongside the architecture and engineering firms, the general contractors, the equipment manufacturers. Everyone has to be working together in those timelines.
And so, you know, I don't know what the exact number is, but I'd say somewhere probably between, like, 75, 85, you know, percent of the conversation is around engineering. It's around timelines. It's technical work.
It's not negotiating of the terms. And so really the, you know, the permits remain one of the last few items that investors can noticeably, uh, see just by what's out there in the public realm.
But it's not as if the permits are a light switch that, you know, you flip one, you get one, and then a lease is signed immediately. It's one of the last things that are remaining there for the investors to see publicly.
But in the background, we're focusing on, on continuing with the, uh, finalizing, double-checking, triple-checking the engineering, the, uh, commercial side, the general contracting side, the equipment manufacturing side so it all lines up.
Um, and that's, that's really all that's left in order for us to be comfortable with, with signing a lease. So, um, there's still a few more things.
Like I said, it's not a light switch, but, um, everyone is, is very, very motivated to secure the power, and that is exactly what we're motivated to do as well, is to secure the tenants.
So o-on that note, zooming in here, y- there are a number of [clicks tongue] uh, there are a number of permitting and environmental sign-offs that y'all need.
You mentioned that the Panther Creek's final environmental permit on the call is, quote, "Taking a few months longer than anticipated." Why is that?
And as a follow-up, can you give us a kind of TLDR breakdown of exactly what permitting and regulatory sign-offs y'all need for Sharon Panther Creek? Yeah. So the, um,
like I said, you know, I think with you guys before, right, there's three general buckets of permitting. You've got zoning, you have development, and you have engineer- or environmental.
You know, zoning tends to be your controversial one. It's the one where you have town halls, and the community engagement is very, very high.
It's also the one where, you know, the necessary fact sets of the patter- of the project might not necessarily be what determines the outcome because it can be political, it can be emotional.
Um, once you're past zoning, which is the controversial one, then you go through development. Development tends to be very engineering and process driven.
It's, "Hey, you know, the setbacks require you to be 20 feet back from the property line. There are building restrictions no higher than, you know, X feet. You need to meet these kind of noise requirements.
You need to have these kind of light requirements at different times in the day." It's not very political, right?
It's very much a, "These are what we agreed to as kind of the frameworks and the parameters to guide construction, and are the plans that you're submitting compliant with those? If you are, great. Proceed.
If not, these are where you're not compliant. This is what you need to revise to be, you know, um, compliant, and then you can proceed." And then the same thing with the environmental.
Um, the environmental is very process driven. It's very data driven. It doesn't tend to be political.
The permits that we have remaining in Pennsylvania largely have to do with stormwater waste runoff and connecting into municipal sewer systems. These are not politically controversial permits, right?
We're not talking about flushing millions of gallons of water a day into a municipal sewer system.
We're talking about making sure the employees on site have the normal facilities that any facility would have, and they're connected into the municipal sewer system.
Um, we're talking about making sure that the standard plans for any kind of development, um, are there for stormwater waste runoff and how that's gonna be controlled and managed with the, with the layout of the land.
So these are pretty standard. They're pretty straightforward, and there's nothing to be read into on the delays. There's just two different departments in Pennsylvania for the Department of Environmental Protection.
There's an eastern office, which serves obviously the eastern side of the state where Philadelphia and the vast majority of the population and the industry is.
And then there's a western office which s- you know, serves a much smaller population and a much smaller industrial base, which is where Sharon and Scribd Grass are.
And so at Sha- uh, the western side of the state, fewer applications, fewer permits to work through, and they have less of a backlog.
On the eastern side of the state, way more permits to work through, a bit less, a bit more understaffed, and they have a bit more of a backlog.
But we haven't received anything in the permitting process that would give us, you know, pause, concern, alarm, and nothing for the tenants as well.
Um, these just continue to remain moving forward at the same time that we're running the commercial process, and we have not had one concern from the tenants around the remaining permits at either of those sites.
So I'll throw a question in here. Um, looking at Moses Lake in Washington, uh, I think it's your smallest site, 18 megawatts, and it looks like you, uh, did not exercise the option to expand it- Yes...
another 10 megawatts, which would, would have been 28. What's the reasoning for that? I'm, I'm kinda curious. Everyone wants more power. Why are we not doing more power?
Uh, so it's a great question, and let me walk through kind of the reason why we got the option in the first place and why we walked away from it.
So, you know, obviously Moses Lake at 18 megawatts is the smallest site that we have under active development.
Um, and it just, because of the scale, limits itself down to, you know, a different kind of, of potential customer.
What we, you know, thought would be a very attractive, you know, um, kind of, you know, sweetener to any sort of a, um, a, a tenant contract in Moses Lake would not only be to have 18 megawatts but would be to have the ability to expand beyond that and continuing growing.
Because at every site that we've seen with every tenant that we've spoken to, they don't just want first power, but they want a relationship to grow over time with and to scale over, over a longer period of time.
And so we thought it would be an attractive thing for us to do, acquire a low-cost option, have that optionality in the commercial process.
If tenants would be interested in the site but maybe they need a little bit more power, we would have that there to provide greater optionality and greater value to the tenant.
Um- But what it's come down to is, is that like I said earlier, it's all just about timelines, and the 10-megawatt option was not for a, a 10 megawatts adjacent to our site.
It was a 10 megawatts at a different site in the same town. Um, it was going to be associated with much longer timelines.
And one of the things is, is, with smaller sites is a lot of the costs just don't amortize as well over way fewer megawatts.
Some of the things are fixed regardless of if it's 18 megawatts, 100 megawatts, or 350 megawatts, it's the same amount of work.
And so, you know, what we would rather do is we, you know, we brought that to have optionality for the tenants and provide extra value for the tenants.
But we would rather focus on the better opportunities that we have in our portfolio to acquire and secure larger sites, which don't have the same kind of economy of scale disadvantages of something like a 10 megawatts.
We'd rather focus on bigger sites, um, especially in the East Coast, Northeast, and the Midwest area, where we think inference is going to be, uh, the highest, you know, demand market, and that's where we wanna try and, and focus our efforts moving forward.
So, um, we think it's, you know, the right thing to do to continue to grow the pipeline and allocate resources internally, uh, effectively.
Uh, going back to Pennsylvania, you talked a bit about permitting, um, and I want to ask a question about the Sharon site, which if it looks like you've collapsed the 30 and 80 megawatt phases into one
single 110 megawatt phase, um, what's behind that decision? Uh, yeah. Yeah. So, uh, that's what we're working towards right now.
We're, we're pretty close to thinking that we're, we're gonna have that finalized and done, but it's not a, a done deal today.
Um, the reason why is because even the proximity between the racks themselves have huge latency impacts.
And so, you know, the closer that we can get the compute to itself, the better it is for the performance of the site and for the tenant.
And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to try and consolidate the power density as much as possible. The original design was a little bit more, uh, spread out across, you know, multiple buildings.
Here, we're trying to consolidate it in closer and closer so that it is, you know, an ultimately better product for the end tenants.
Um, we think that we've accomplished that with, uh, our engineering, or we're about to accomplish that with, with our final engineering plans.
Um, and we look f-forward to talking about that publicly once it's final, you know, with the new updated plans, the site images and the renders and everything else.
Uh, but ultimately it was just trying to make a better product for the customers. So it's kinda like the Jensen scale up, now you're trying to scale out- Correct... uh, idea. Gotcha. So Ben,
with regards to leases in, uh, uh, you know, potential leases in the pipeline, you, you've said before that
companies like Keel are kind of in this Goldilocks zone, and I kind of read that as you're not a first mover, but you've gotten to see how certain deals have been moved across the finish line, and we're actually seeing dollar per megawatt deals for powered shells move upwards.
I mean, the, the, the infamous example of this is C- Core Scientific with the CoreWeave deal. Great deal at the time. CoreWeave, you know, paying for the build-out.
But if you actually look at the unit economics, there have been better b- deals struck since, and you can say the same about some of the earlier deals with Terawulf and Cipher as well.
We're starting to see, uh, you know, this segment kind of feel out what makes the most sense, and it seems like they're able to juice more from these deals as the timeline goes on and we continue to move into this CapEx cycle.
Long-winded way of asking this, and I know you can't give too many specifics, but with regards to a structured deal, what kind of economics and deal structure for these leases is Keel privileging?
Like, what would you like to see in terms of terms, duration, et cetera? If you could just, like, give us a teaser.
I know you can't speak to specific numbers, but just curious where y'all's head's at in terms of how you structure these things. Yeah. You're-- It's-- I mean, it's a great question.
You're right, I can't speak to specific numbers. But, you know, we, we talked about this 18 months ago. The economics were gonna continue to improve. They have, right?
Um, and it's not a perfectly straight line, but if you chart out every single lease that has been announced, you know, and you put it on kind of an apples to apples footing, like a per megawatt basis or per megawatt per month basis, wherever you wanna look at it, like, you'll see that the direction is pretty abundantly clear, right?
Like, the economics have continued to improve up and to the right, uh, for the last 18 months. And so we do think that there is a, a second mover advantage.
Um, you know, we also can avoid a lot of the mistakes that, you know, people have learned the hard way, right?
Um, you know, we saw earlier on what, what happened with people giving exclusivity too early on in the commercial process, and ultimately it resulted in massive, massive delays because you grant someone six months exclusivity and you shut yourself off from everyone else, then you have to grant the next person six month exclusivity starting from zero, and then the next one.
And so, you know, we've learned that, um, from our peers, you know, the good and the bad of what's happened.
We've seen the market evolve, and we've been able to, you know, kind of play into what we've seen as the trend for economics and continued power scarcity to our advantage.
So, um, you know, th-that-- with that overall framework in mind, um, what I can speak to in terms of deal structuring is, you know, we prefer triple nets. We're not trying to, you know, uh, be
crazy in creating creative new structures. You know, we're not looking to sell, you know, rum raisin or pistachio cream. Like, we like vanilla. Vanilla is totally good. Um, vanilla sells all over the world.
It's popular everywhere. Everyone likes it. It's easy to understand. You don't need to get too exotic.
Sometimes simple is better, and I think for the investors, they prefer something that's easy to model, easy to understand, easy to forecast, minimal variables. So that means triple net.
We like triple net structures across the board.
Um, and we should expect to be getting, I think, triple net structures across the board, with one exception being Moses Lake, and that's just because the customer profile there is so different than at Sharon or at Panther Creek, and they really need a more turnkey solution, where the larger players are looking to take a lot more, um, you know, operational involvement and control.
And so, you know, we're able to, uh, proceed on triple net, which is the preferred option for 99% of our portfolio. For the 1% of our portfolio that's Moses Lake, we'll take the structure which is best for the...
you know, maximizing value for that particular site. Um, but overall, we are very focused on triple nets. I'm, I'm gonna start demanding more food analogies from other executives. Also, my wife in shambles.
She thinks that vanilla is a boring flavor. I think vanilla- She's wrong. I actually like vanilla more than most other- Vanilla rules... fruit. Yeah. Vanilla freaking rules.
Everyone likes vanilla except for your wife, I guess. So- [laughs]... it's generally a, a, a pretty good way to go, I think.
So Ben, I have one more question for y'all specifically, and then I wanna zoom out to the sector at writ large.
Curious about lead times for equipment and whether or not Keel has moved forward for securing long lead time items, whether or not you're seeing any snags within the supply chain considering there's so much demand.
You could just speak to that, uh, the supply chain logistics side of things very quickly. Yeah, I can.
And, you know, slightly different, um, at each site, but j- by and large, what we've done is, uh, Moses Lake, absolutely everything is secured. It's contracted.
It's either received on site or it's being manufactured somewhere else, and we're waiting to receive it on site in the coming months.
Um, with regards to Sharon and Panther Creek, what we've been doing, this is what I spoke to earlier in the commercial process, you run all of that simultaneously.
Like, you have to run two parallel paths because different customers could have different equipment choices, and they could wildly differ.
Um, there are big changes, especially when it comes to things like backup generation solutions.
That's usually one of the big areas where people have very differing opinions and equipment choices, and that can represent, you know, $2 to $3 million a megawatt in terms of CapEx.
So that's a big one that you don't want to put on your balance sheet unnecessarily.
And so what we do is we go parallel paths with the tenants, with the general contractors, the NE firms, and most importantly, those equipment manufacturers to make sure those supply chains and the, the timelines are all lined up, and then you ideally execute all at the same time.
What you don't wanna have is you don't wanna have, you know, uh, an unmatched liability where we've just signed up to procure, you know, $3 billion of equipment that we f- you know, don't have the tenant for, and we also don't want to sign up for a tenant to deliver $3 billion of equipment that we don't have secured.
And so the way that you try and balance this is by concurrently running those processes in parallel and then getting to the point where you can sign all the agreements all at the same time and not have those unmatched liabilities.
And at the stage where we are right now, working through with our Go Vertical partners and the equipment supply chain, we're hitting those earliest RFS dates in 2027, um, with a little bit of ramp into 2028 for Sharon and then a ramp through 2028 for Panther Creek.
So the timelines that our customers want, first power online in '27 and continuing to ramp from there, uh, we're very confident we can achieve those timelines, um, based on all of the work that we've done to date, all of the contract negotiations we've done, and all of the work with the supply chain manufacturers.
But that's, that's generally the framework how you want to, uh, to run that. I appreciate that. All right. Last question from me. I'll toss it to Charlie for a closer. I know we gotta get you out of here soon.
So you said on the call that you're, quote, uh, you're watching, quote, "The increasing amounts of intercompany financing across the industry," end quote, as a top risk.
What specifically concerns you, and how does this affect Keel's approach to tenant credit support? And also, what financing options y'all would entertain once you have a lease on the books? Yeah.
So I think that came up in, um, analyst Q&A in response to a question of, like, what is your biggest risk factor for, for Keel rolling forward? And, um, you know, the answer that we gave was, we think it's macro, right?
The stuff that the company is, is executing against, we are incredibly confident in. We know that the demand is there for the power. We know that we are making the progress that we want on the permits.
So we are very confident in what we are in control of. I think the, the one thing that, you know, is constantly changing in this space is the macro environment, right? Um, and it's changing on a, on a daily basis.
Monday is something new. Tuesday is completely different. Wednesday is somehow different than that. And by the time you get to Friday, it feels like a month has passed, and it's been five days.
So, you know, those are the things that we really, you know, try to, try to keep a closer eye on, um, is just what is going on in the broader financing market. This is a very capitally intensive industry.
The cost of financing these projects can really change the ultimate economics of the project themselves, and we wanna make sure that we're hitting the market at the times that we wanna hit the market, where we can get the best economics and the best deals.
And sometimes, you know, high-yield market will just shut down. Sometimes it's really, really cheap to do a convertible. Sometimes there's a tremendous amount of low-cost debt. Sometimes there's not.
And so what we are keeping an eye on, you know, is this macro factor of what's going on in the world. How is this impacting the broader industry?
What does that have in terms of implications for, uh, supply and demand side of the equation? And, you know- We are really focusing on how do we get the most value out of what we have in our pipeline.
And so understanding that macro piece, understanding the timing component of these things, we think is really mission critical. So to wrap up, kind of a broad industry question about AI models.
Um, open models have been having a bit of renaissance. Jensen had that big letter, NVIDIA, and pretty much everybody signed except for a conspicuous couple companies. Um, in a world where open weight models,
uh, become much more prevalent, maybe even dominant, what happens to the market? Who wins in this scenario? Who loses in this scenario? Yeah, what does this look like in your view?
Um, you know, anyone's guess at this point is, is really as, as good as mine.
Um, but I think what we're seeing is we're seeing there is starting to be a lot of, uh, segmentation in the market, and people are starting to become more and more niche players, right?
You're seeing platforms come out, um, like Higgsfield, which is trying to establish itself as like the premier like image video generation platform, you know.
And then you've got that as completely separate from Claude for Enterprise, which is completely separate from ChatGPT, which is more consumer friendly or consumer directed.
And then you've got, you know, the open weight models out of China. How all of this is gonna evolve, I don't think anyone really knows.
But I think what it shows is that there's gonna be more than one model dominating across the market, because as with everything in this world, uh, people like to specialize, people like to focus in, and people generally don't want to have, you know, like, um, one solution for absolutely everything in the box, because you can't be the best solution for everything in the box when you're a solution for absolutely everything, right?
If you are a company, you don't have, you know, one system, right?
You may have payroll, you may have a legal system, you may have a business development system, you have a customer relationship management system, you've got finance systems, you've got payroll systems, right?
It's not, I think, reasonable to think that one system is going to rule all of those systems. I think we're gonna see increasing fragmentation, specialization of these models start to emerge.
Um, and I think it's a great example of Jevons paradox playing out here, because the reality is, is that, you know, there's always different ways that you can do price segmentation, and you can try and capture more value for premium services or lower value for lower quality services, right?
This is the-- you know, this is a very proven economic model. You know, airplanes sell, uh, economy, premium economy, business, first class. Trains do a similar thing. Cruise ships do this.
You know, the China model has been, um, focusing on low cost volume, you know, in terms of just how they produce goods and services, and the Chinese as, or the US system has always been focused on higher quality, higher value.
So in some situations, maybe you're like an, you know, a defense industry contractor. You prob- maybe don't want the open weight model.
Maybe you want the highly specialized model for, for you, which is going to be maybe it's Claude, or maybe it's something you've developed specifically for yourself.
Um, but I think the more applications that you see, the more models that you see, the more optionality that there is, people will start to do price segmentation, um, more and more.
And I think, you know, you're gonna see enterprises focus more and more on the higher quality models, and you're gonna see retail gravitate towards the cheaper Chinese models.
Because if, you know, for us as a business, um, I don't want slop, right?
[chuckles] Like we, we use Claude in our management team, and, you know, we, uh, encourage everyone to be asking Claude questions and trying to, to, to play around with Claude as much as possible.
We don't want anyone running anything through, you know, uh, open weight models right now.
Like, we want everything on an enterprise system that is, you know, secured, that is safe, that is, you know, signed off by our IT team, is reliable.
Um, but you know, if I go home and I wanna generate a, you know, cute picture of a dog or something, you know, I'm not gonna be using Claude, right? I'm gonna be using a different model.
I think it's just showing how early we are and the, the future is gonna be increasing fragmentation, um, and specialization. Ben Gagnon, CEO of Keel, Captain Keel himself. Thank you for joining, man.
Really appreciate it. Best of luck with the rest of the year, and we'll have to run it back Q3 when y'all have results then as well. Thanks, guys. Looking forward to it. Thanks for your time, Ben. Thanks, Ben.
One quick thing here. A lot-- I mean, the troll box is popping off on this one today. Yeah. We see the comments. We love the comments. I, I want to just highlight this from Joke in a Box, or Jock in a Box, great name.
"Guys, help the channel out. If this gives you value, like it, like it, et cetera." It helps them out, like leaving a good server a tip. That's not one of us in a- That's not one of us.
We really appreciate- That's, I promise that's not a spoof. Yeah. Yeah, we really appreciate that. Um, thank you, Jock in a Box. Subscribe to this channel, give us a like, comment, um, a- anywhere you find it.
Share it with people who are also invested in these buckets of assets. Uh, this is the end of our earnings week's coverage almost. We've got one more interview tomorrow.
We also have Hive Digital's results, uh, coming in at the end of market, uh, market close tomorrow, and then there's a live stream that we're gonna be doing on Monday.
That being said, we've had interviews with a number of CEOs. We've live streamed most of the major earnings calls.
You can go to our channel, go to live, and you can find that, and you can also find clips from the CEO interviews if you're interested. Yeah.
There's a playlist with exec- called Executive Interviews on the YouTube, where we, uh, aggregate all the executive interviews we've had, not just during earnings week, but just in general 'cause we do c- we have these interviews all throughout the year, not just earnings week, so Thanks for tuning in I'm 100% on that.
Yeah, thank, thank you, guys.
And one last thing I'll say with regards to Keel, so Ben mentioned in the earnings call Q&A section with analysts that the management team has a betting pool on which site will get a lease first.
Based on that interview, if I were a betting man and I were at Keel, I'd probably put it at Moses Lake, but not financially, like- Well, it sounds like he- I mean, he sounded pretty confident.
He's like, he's pretty- Oh, yeah... like, he's like, "We've no... It's a particular, it's a particular, you know, client profile," so that sounds like it's this one.
Yeah, Moses Lake definitely seems closest to initially- But it's the smallest. It's the pi- it's the one people don't care about. Yeah.
And it's the one- They're all, they're all like, "Three deals of the year," which I get, guys, but, you know.
Yeah, and I know there are a l- a, a lot of folks who are kind of frustrated with not having a clear timeline on these things.
Uh, my read from this though is that if they can get this permitting done this year, I think we're going to get leases announced sooner than most people think.
Ben's going to be conservative, because he doesn't want to give a specific date and then be in hot water later, even if he was talking about getting three across the finish line earlier in the year.
I understand people are frustrated, but, um, anyway, I think that does it for Keel, Charlie. Yeah. Uh, stick around.
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We're gonna get dragged if this video gets to, uh, this clip gets to your neighborhood Facebook group, but for now, uh, we're gonna close with a CNN article, uh, out this morning profiling how data centers transformed the economy of this small town.
The small town in question, Quincy, Washington, a rural farming town
of roughly 8,500 people in Central Washington, which has seen major public infrastructure upgrades funded largely by data centers, one of which is a $15 million aquatic center,
an upcoming Q-Plex indoor sports complex, and a, am I correct reading this column, $120 million high school? Yeah. State-of-the-art high school valued at 120 million US dollars.
If, I struggle to see how a high school... Anyway, um. I mean, there, there's probably a consideration there where maybe they're, the, the county is financing that, and then they plan to pay down the financing- Yeah...
with tax revenues from- Yeah... the site. Right. Yeah. So let me keep going. Where is this money coming from?
It's coming from roughly 30 data centers, um, that started with a Microsoft data center back in the 2000s, later joined by Yahoo, Dell, Intuit, and others.
These data centers pay an estimated, sit down, 57% of the city's property taxes. They, why are they there? Because of cheap, abundant hydroelectric power from the Columbia River.
So over half of the property taxes, I should have scoped out where Washington and this county sits in terms of property taxes, but I can't, like in relative to the field, but I can't imagine it's, uh, the cheapest in the world.
Um, yeah. In Washington, absolutely not. That's why I'm saying. It's Washington, king of... Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna tax some good notes.
As someone who lives just south of Washington in the Communist Republic of Oregon, I can tell you [laughs]
that depending on where it is, now if you're in the more rural areas, the property taxes actually tend to be s- uh, lower than the national average.
Well, it doesn't, if you're in, if you're in, uh, Quincy, Washington, it probably doesn't matter as much, 'cause mo- because your property, the property taxes are being paid by the data centers, and they're going to community development.
And what's, what are some other upsides? 900 direct jobs, engineers, pipe fitters, four to six indirect jobs each. Uh, uh, yeah. Um, so what are...
A- another crazy stat is the poverty rate in this county dropped from 29.4% in 2012 to 6.2% in 2024. What? Like, you can, you can, um...
When, when poverty rates are going up, uh, in Western countries, particularly the United States, um, dropping poverty rate, not just incrementally, but substantially, uh, is massive. There's new housing, new businesses.
Um, the local officials call it the Quincy Miracle that turned this low-opportunity farming town into a brand-new everything town. Um, what's the downsides? I love a brand, a brand-new everything town. Yeah.
What are the downsides of this? Um, well, uh, power rates rose, but they only rose by 3.5%. Um, industrial parts- Also, uh, just a quick, a c- a quick caveat there. I, I really wonder about this specifically when we...
So this is, i- in Oregon, power rates are going up here as well. Uh, Oregon is one of the, in terms of concentration of data centers, one of the largest in the US, at least before this AI boom.
Part of this, though, is that, number one, both of these states have started prioritizing solar panels and wind over base load, and if you're in the southern part of Oregon, that's fine. It's sunny here all the time.
It, we get a lot of sunshine. Uh, it's not as rainy as it is in Portland and Seattle. That being said, they're also starting to decommission dams, hydro dams in the area.
Some of that is for environmental reasons because they're worried about salmon. Uh, f- some of it is just Looney Tunes, as far as I can tell.
So when you see something like that, m- there's m- there might be some truth to the fact that the data centers are driving it.
I will say, though, a lot of the policies that have been put in place over the last decade have been explicitly, like, anti-growth on the energy front, right? Yeah. Kind of- Well, they're trying-...
in these utopic- Yeah... green, green energy fantasies. Yeah. Well, they're trying to basically ensure that there's no more Quincy miracles happen. God forbid, uh, your town would get a little- [laughs]... property tax.
God f- God forbid my to- [laughs] God forbid a man get a little data center tax- Yeah... revenue. Okay.
So, so I've been, I've been kind of dismissive, uh, 'cause the, the, you know, uh, basically data centers bring tons of money, jobs, everything. Um,
however, if you've lived in the town for forever, this is a story pretty much any place in the world which ex- which experiences economic boom town, this happens everywhere. Um, rising housing costs.
You might call this gentrification. It's not necessarily that. It's just demand in this case, not people coming in and making everything way too nice so you have to move out.
But housing costs are up, uh, pretty significantly. Housing costs have roughly doubled since then. This, th- sorry, can I piggyback on this for a second, Charlie? Yeah.
To me, this is the clearest negative for data center builds for local communities. Yeah. Um, the electricity price thing really isn't that big of a, uh, isn't that big of an issue.
If you look nationally, at least, on average, when a data center moves into an area, actually they create grid stability because the utility now has a bulk buyer of energy, and they can potentially fire up additional assets, some that have been remaining idle.
It actually helps with the economics more often than not. The water use thing is just a total non-starter. It, it is a complete straw man for what's actually happening. It's a ridiculous point. Yeah.
I don't know why people keep making it. Uh, just their brains being- And, but no one's making the housing argument, and that's a- Yeah... that's a huge one because number, there are a few things at play here.
These towns are often very small. I mean, Quincy, the latest census was, like, just south of 8,000. So these are areas that have really no industrial base. You're bringing in these data centers.
There's suddenly a huge surge in demand for housing, specifically when they're being built. So you kinda have this,
this interesting equation to where they become boom towns when they're being built, and that rent is going to get driven up, but that rent's probably going to cascade back down at a certain point because the, the times at which these data centers employ the most people is when they're being constructed.
I mean, you saw the Iron video that we played earlier in the segment, uh, earlier in the show. Thousands of people. We said thousands of people. In the middle- Yeah... of nowhere, Texas. I mean, yeah. I- I- if you go...
So back to the Facebook, uh, the Facebook Boomer Facebook group, um, they hate what they call, uh, like, man camps, where it's, like, a bunch of Winnebagos out in the middle of, you know, nowhere of a bunch of, uh, dirty, blue collar, salt of the earth working guys out there, you know, uh, laying copper and, uh, and welding and, uh- And grilling steaks after- Oh, terrible...
a long day of construction. Yeah. But, but- Cracking Busch lights. But, like, think about it, though. I mean, this is, like, a, a huge issue.
You got a bunch of, uh, probably single, uh, transitory guys who are there for four to six months.
Granted, they're working all the time, but I, it, it might be fun to be the owner of the local watering hole for a couple months, but then, man, it... If y- just imagine. And, and, you know, it, I, I totally get, um,
uh, the housing thing. Uh, I don't know how you solve that.
That is kind of a- I, I don't think you can solve it other than, like, maybe some towns try to strike a deal with the developer saying, like, "You need to have temp housing." Some- I, I don't know how you do that.
That would be add to the burden here. I, I think the simplest ac- uh, to your point, the simplest thing that they can do probably is just have, like, these kind of,
you know, like you said, these itinerant camps of workers coming in, and maybe you just have them there. You know? It's, like, basically a big music festival, just a bunch of RVs and big [laughs] tents. Yeah.
It, it might have to, it might have something to do with perhaps considering the full cycle impact of the, of these sites.
Um, less think about it more narrowly from just property taxes today, but how do you offset rising costs of rent?
'Cause if you consider that you have people in these towns who have been living there for, for a long time who are renting, like, that, it, that's just a terrible situation to be in. I hate to see that. Yeah.
For those who own homes, like, it might, they might enjoy their house going up. If their property taxes go up, uh, they're not gonna- They're not gonna enjoy that...
they're not gonna enjoy- Especially when you consider the median income in these towns is often at or below the national average- Yeah...
because they're just re- there aren't in- there is not really much industry in these towns. There's, there's, you know, there's not really any job growth, especially in the Pacific Northwest.
I hate to keep hammering this, but, like, if you look at national employment statistics, like, Oregon and Washington are- Really struggling with regards to adding their- Why?
They're tech- they're tech capitals of the world... not Oregon. What's going on there? Seattle kind of is. Oh, Seattle. But like, the fact of the matter is there are a lot of social problems.
I mean, no one wants to build in cities where quite frankly like there's so much social disruption, and you have homeless people everywhere openly using drugs on the sidewalks, you know.
So, um, not- We've turned this into a different kind of podcast [laughs] Yeah, not, not to hammer on that too much.
I wanna highlight one other instance of data center prosperity though here, and we kinda covered it on the show I think a week back. But specifically Applied Digital in Ellendale, uh, North Dakota.
Ellendale is a very tiny city, and their pre-data center tax revenue, um, or sales tax take was roughly $400,000 a year.
In the first seven months of 2026, the town collected 3.5 million from this data center that Applied Digital has erected in the area. That's 9X its old full year total.
That was used for street repaving, a senior center renovation, new public safety complex, walking trails, and a restoration of the town's historic opera house. You know,
I, I do just think that it is important to highlight these, because I think that, number one, there is so much negative press regarding these data centers, particularly within the legacy media.
The fact of the matter is the reality is going to be somewhere in the middle. There are negative externalities.
Rising rents in some of these large town- of these small towns can, uh, significantly impact the local tax base. That should be listened to.
But the fact of the matter is you have towns that are, some of them are dying and floundering. No one wants to live there. People who grew up there move out.
Now they actually have money to improve the town, and I, I ca- it's hard for me to say that that's not a huge positive if weighed against some of the negative benefits. I also think that it's an interesting
example of the fact that if you look back in the '50s and '60s, the wealthiest town, the wealthiest cities in the US were in the Rust Belt in terms of per capita income and per capita net worth.
And then Tulsa, Oklahoma 'cause of oil money, but yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay, good, good example. I mean, that, you could also say this with oil and gas boom as well. Yeah.
But if you look at that, like things like Detroit and Cleveland, they, they had some of the highest standards of living and were super wealthy.
I, I think that you're going to have a similar scenario probably over the next few decades with regards to some of these data centers, at least in terms of the tax base, that, that the, the states and the towns that privilege these data centers are going to reap fruits that are obvious in hindsight-
Yeah... compared to the places that are shunning them. Uh, comment in chat, "Once locals figure out how much money is available for the community, they'll beg for the data center to build there."
I think we'll see many such cases. I think it's gonna be all over the place as, uh, it's probably deal specific. We cover this a lot.
Like, a lot of these are gonna be deal specific, and, um, I think if the people can wake up to the reality that, um, you might be able to use your, you know, your zoning and your permitting, uh, bottlenecks as s- really as, as leverage against these folks, not to kick them out or prevent them from building, but rather to say, "We want you here.
You've got to pay, uh, your diligent- your, your dues to the town." Because they have money. And as- Yeah...
as permits become like the constraining factor, if it requires them to just commit more cash towards public infrastructure,
s- uh, certain, uh, you know, certain initiatives, uh, I think you'll see people who are very, very happy. Um- Yeah, it's probably- Um... it's very deal specific. Yeah.
Uh, one last comment from me and then we can, uh, put this horse down. Uh, there's a lot to talk about here obviously. Yeah. But I, I do... So that comment came from YouTube, Go- Goog. Hell yeah.
And there's some fantastic names in the troll box today. I agree with that in part.
I will say, I think we have reached such a polarized point in our political discourse that I think that people actually privilege moral arguments over substantive arguments with regards to what's actually beneficial.
I wouldn't be surprised if you saw some really obdurate
citizens and obdurate, uh, you know, political factions that irrespective of the benefits that these data centers could bring, they're just gonna oppose them on vague moral grounds that might not even stand up to scrutiny.
But
s- some people will just straight up not want them, uh, for, for, uh, for the same reason why certain people, uh, don't like to do, d- don't wanna clean up their cities or institute law and order, because they think that it's, you know, kind of propping up something that they don't believe in.
Anyway- I think it's funny...
I'm, I'm kind of b- Carl lives in a commie state and is more conservative than me I live in a commie state, but I- I live in a, in a, in a r- in a very, very red state and I'm more commie than Ca- and I think we're the, we're the communist ones See, I live in a commie state, but in a locality that is very libertarian, don't tread on me.
So I, I... It's, it's just, uh, because- Which is funny 'cause I live in, I live in the most purple or blue county- You have-... in the reddest state [laughs]
Well, it's interesting to see the way that the, uh- We're probab- we're probably like, uh, right, perfectly ideally, like ideologically aligned because of this [laughs] Yeah.
There's like, we're like, our, our, our areas are like diametrically- Yeah... uh, it's, it's like the inverse of what the other one is, is seeing. Yeah. But you do get to see the push and pull of both- Yeah...
arguments as a result. So anyway. Yeah. Okay, enough about that. Thank you for listening to Block Space Live. We do this live stream every single weekday at 1:00 PM Eastern. We are Compute's daily live show.
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