Brian Sullivan (Anchor) 00:00.150
joining us now in an exclusive interview asher gnute he is the CEO of hut eight asher good to chat with you again obviously you just heard the oracle story it doesn't appear that you and your team are having similar concerns or issues how did this deal yours come about
Asher Genoot (CEO) 00:17.870
good to see you again brian nice to meet you kelly and excited this time not just talking about the power markets like we did when we were at EEI we're talking about this really important news to hot aids for us when we were looking at customers to work with the scale with
Asher Genoot (CEO) 00:32.030
credit counterparty was extremely important and we believe that google is one of the most credible counterparties from investment grade credit in the world they have an operating business that spits out cash flow that can fund their investments into the AI they have a hardware
Asher Genoot (CEO) 00:46.670
business tpus they have a car business in waymos they own youtube so as a large consortium as a player we believe that having google as the end financial backs up of the fifteen year commitment gives us confidence in this data center build and deploying this capital and building
Asher Genoot (CEO) 01:05.470
for the suite of customers which include fluid sex as the tenant and tropic as an end user in google as a financial backstop
Kelly Evans (Anchor) 01:13.310
sure do i read here correctly that you were were or are crypto miners
Asher Genoot (CEO) 01:17.670
so we build an energy infrastructure platform so today we build infrastructure that supports various compute that includes bitcoin compute and that also includes AI computing so instead of converting we actually spun out another public company called american bitcoin and we
Asher Genoot (CEO) 01:33.350
continue to run data centers for both types of compute
Kelly Evans (Anchor) 01:35.630
because i'm i'm just curious at the same time we're talking about the incredible demand for AI compute is the demand for crypto compute slowing it or becoming less interesting at all
Asher Genoot (CEO) 01:46.880
no we think it's a different type of demand the sites that bitcoin data centers are willing to go to are sites that you can curtail more often sites and more bespoke areas and so we continue to see demand that captive for us from american bitcoin and that allows us to underwrite
Asher Genoot (CEO) 02:02.760
new megawatts that otherwise we may not be able to underwrite an example of that is we have a one gigawatt project in corpus christi called lawn hill that site if we had just invested into it for AI data centers we might say you know what maybe a customer doesn't want to come
Asher Genoot (CEO) 02:17.470
here but we invested into it because we knew that our bitcoin compute was willing to go there and today we're starting to have customer conversation on that side as well
Brian Sullivan (Anchor) 02:24.950
yeah and you're making this deal a fluid stack which is backed by google how important right now asher you just heard the oracle story how important is choosing the right partner these are multi billion dollar multi year deals you have to make sure you have the right partner
Asher Genoot (CEO) 02:43.590
it's critical when we underwrite the development of these infrastructure assets we think about who are the ones that were embedding on that will be able to continue to pay those financial obligations during the term of that contract and bringing on JP morgan and goldman sachs as
Asher Genoot (CEO) 03:00.150
partners and being able to finance up to eighty five percent of the data center at sofr plus two twenty five that's extremely accretive and extremely competitive financing on project global financing at a really high LTC percentage and so JP morgan and goldman have shown that
Asher Genoot (CEO) 03:18.590
this credit the counterparty is really competitive and they're willing to use their balance sheets to back us as well